From PublicAddress.net
In case you hadn't picked up on this already, the title of my speech tonight is firmly tongue in cheek. The title of Barack Obama's first volume of memoirs is The Audacity of Hope. My facetious suggestion is that our own Great Pretender should call his memoirs The Audacity of Hype. Call me a cynic if you must , but it strikes me that John Key's reputation and rise to political prominence has been enabled by fairly shameless marketing and spin.
You could say this is true of many politicians, but I think Key is a case worthy of special examination – mainly because he could be our next Prime Minister. Yes, all politicians are public constructs to a certain extent … perception being reality, as we're so often and glibly reminded by political commentators, they contrive to present an electable persona based on aspects of their real selves and a grab-bag of focus-grouped viewpoints and talking points.
But Key seems to need the grab-bag more than most. This is a guy, recall, who when asked where he stood in 1981 on the Springbok tour, pretended he couldn't remember. Now, I wasn't even in the country in 1981 and furthermore I was in the middle of an adventurous phase of my life that involved the consumption of various substances both legal and illegal, and I can remember what I thought. What is Key's problem that he is so palpably nervous about expressing a position without apparently first running it by the backroom boys for likely electoral appeal?
At times he simply plays to whichever gallery he's facing. On the matter of his religious beliefs he has variously said, talking to students in Victoria University's Salient student newspaper: "I'm not deeply religious, and I don't believe in life after death."
When talking to the born-again reactionary editor of Investigate Magazine: "I have lived my life by Christian principles."
And to the readers of the Jewish Chronicle: "I will be the third Jewish prime minister in New Zealand."
As the Labour affiliated website The Standard observed, this actually makes Key the Ken doll of Kiwi politics - he'll be whoever you want him to be. The Standard went on to note that both Key and Ken were born in 1961, and opined that contrary to media wisdom, he has more in common with the plastic toy than with Barack Obama.
Something he probably also shares with Ken is a certain kind of innocence. Key is on record as claiming to have never taken drugs, even a puff on a joint. Now, that must seem to him to be a safe position to adopt, but really this is one issue he perhaps should have checked first with marketing. He's exactly the same age as me as well as Ken, and let me tell you, it would have been pretty remarkable to get through the 70s and 80s of our youth without at least finding out what certain things were like, even if you ended up avoiding them for the rest of your life. I wonder how many middle-aged Kiwis would really be much concerned about the admission of a bit of youthful experimentation. I do know plenty who would look askance at someone so naïve and incurious as to have never even been tempted.
My point is, he's either being disingenuous, or he's inviting the obvious question: can we trust the country to a man so patently unworldly?
Key has routinely made himself out to be the blandest, least offensive, beige-coloured politician whenever questioned about matters of personal history or taste. As a friend of mine of similar vintage observed, our generation has now thrown up its political figurehead and he turns out to be a former forex dealer who likes Robbie Williams and owns a MacMansion at Omaha Beach. What have we done to deserve this?
Even Barack Obama has got away with admitting to a little drug experimentation when he was younger. Apparently, unlike the previous White House Democrat, he even inhaled! He's also black, has an Islamic middle name and was linked to a firebrand paranoid preacher … and he's still the likeliest next president of the USA. John Key can really afford to get a little more interesting.
But, apart from the diverting spectacle of watching early season episodes of the great American political reality show, are there any deeper lessons for us in all the arcane rituals of choosing a president? After all, we may have already chosen our next prime minister by the time the US finally gets around to its own electoral climax. And we have been told for years now that our own election campaigns have become increasingly "presidential" in style.
Sticking to the Democratic race for now, there's a certain superficial similarity in the race between an older experienced woman and younger man peddling a message of "hope". Hillary Clinton is very much Helen Clark's vintage - not to mention sharing her initials - while Obama is exactly the same age as John Key (and Ken, and me). While it's true that Key isn't quite as black as Obama, he is very much trading on the impression of freshness and generational change versus institutional exhaustion and the corruptions of power.
Both elections will be low down and dirty, but negative campaigns are also a proven turnoff, so the other similarity will be the meta-messages designed to inspire or at least reassure. Labour's may well be another version of the "don't trust these bastards, look what they did last time" theme that was wheeled out in 2005, sugar-coated with appeals to Clark's proven experience and competence (shades of Hillary there, too). In fact, I look forward to Helen's version of Hillary's famous red phone commercial, in which she asked her fellow Americans who they wanted picking up the hotline at 3am – the young untested dude or the trusted elder stateswoman. In Helen's version I imagine her rolling over and saying, "Get that would you Peter …"
In some ways, though, Key reminds me less of Ken or Obama than of another prototype prefabricated politician. He's gone now – and how suddenly! – yet the ghost of Tony Blair still haunts modern image politics. Some people liken Key to the British Conservative Party leader David Cameron – even younger than Key, by the way, but a man prone to making the same sorts of noises about being a "modern compassionate conservative" and the need to "create a new style of politics". But Cameron himself is in turn a response to the Blair phenomenon, which was essentially a masterly act of party political re-branding.
Clues to the New Zealand National Party's rebranding strategy can be seen in the way Key has tried to court the younger voter – by which I mean younger than the youngest baby-boomer, who is in his or her mid 40s by now – and in his recent DVD marketing exercise, in which he declared himself "ambitious for New Zealand", which we'll get to shortly.
At 2007's "40 Below" event, youngish modern conservatives, compassionate or otherwise, were "invited to celebrate New Zealand's future" at an Auckland hotel. Incidentally, the hotel is called the Rendezvous, which always strikes me as sounding unfortunately like the kind of place where you can rent rooms by the hour, which may or may not be appropriate in the context of the National Party.
Event publicity read thus: "The National Party is trying to woo younger voters by inviting celebrities and socialites to meet leader John Key and other National MPs. They are being asked to join them at an event that is being billed as a chance to 'Groove into the future with National'."
Now, the etymological dynamics of the verb "to groove" are more complex than might be assumed at first glance. Probably deriving from the grooves etched into vinyl records – only some under-40s would actually have such folk memories, I guess - the word evolved into a slang term for the act of enjoying popular music, and more generally a certain attitude or response to anything considered, well, groovy.
After the 1970s, however, "groove" as a colloquial term became outmoded, associated with an era of music and culture now deemed passé (the Austin Powers effect, in other words). Later it took on an ironic usage, which in turn made "groove" groovy - but only in the right hands. Or mouths.
Context is all when it comes to the lingua franca of hipness, and in the context of the New Zealand political centre-right there are definite caveats attending its use.
The correct time and place for the contemporary usage of "groove" is subject to a shifting code of coolness (another term that needs to be used advisedly). Deliberate self-referential retro awareness? Fine. Unintentionally patronising fauxness? Not so great. In short, if Jeremy Wells asks you to "groove into the future" you would laugh and "get it". When the National Party does it, the effect isn't quite the same.
Yet it's a sensible and probably essential tactic for Key, who needs to back up his non-Don brand and disconnect the perception of his party as still the natural home of grumbling old codgers or whiny young fogeys. But as fans of Tony Blair discovered once the hype of "Cool Britannia" died down, cocktails and canapés with Oasis and Ben Elton did not miraculously herald a new dawn of switched-on government.
So is New National's policy mix sufficiently in the same groove as its intended X and Y audience? There's little doubt in my mind that a strain of reflexive ideological orthodoxy does run through the generations raised on Rogernomics, many of whom are the genuine social liberal/fiscal conservative hybrid Key seems to know he needs.
As luck would have it, a big study of "Generation Next" (18-26 year olds) by the US Pew Research Centre found young Americans to be, among other things, unprecedentedly tolerant in their political attitudes. They were also more likely to identify as Democrats than Republicans, while at the same time a majority said "getting rich" was their main aim.
Will their Kiwi counterparts buy into Key's "party for people in their 20s and 30s with an interest in New Zealand's future"? I'd say the auguries are good - one of the 40 Below event sponsors was local vodka company 42 Below, recently bought to great media acclaim by a foreign liquor giant for a tidy sum. Let's see - an essentially colourless, flavourless substance transformed by clever brand marketing into a saleable commodity ...
Semantics aside, Key's positioning is very deliberately an Obama-esque claim to being a break with the past and - more importantly – offering a new but fairly fuzzy vision of the future. Given that the main planks in both party platforms differ merely in grain these days, and that a tax cut auction may neutralise the hip-picket vote, he will be busy describing the New Zealand he wants his children to still want to live in.
Indeed, he's been plucking this string for a while now. It was the major theme behind the contrived folksiness of the afforementioned "Ambitious for New Zealand" DVD last year, and it crops up routinely in interviews, including a charming soft-focus open home he and wife Bronagh granted the Australian Women's Weekly. Styled and groomed in smart-casual hues, Key waffled genially about his life to date, his happy marriage and his dream of making a "positive difference, especially with the tragic situation we have of young New Zealanders who simply don't see themselves as having a long-term future in this country. Our brain drain is the worst in the developed world."
Without getting bogged down in the dubious claim that our net outflow of skilled young people is really of such epic proportions compared with similar countries, isn't there something a little pat and unexamined in this key trope of Key's campaign? Is the situation in New Zealand really so "tragic" that our best and brightest see no future here? Or does it suit a politician on the make to exaggerate an imagined negative to accentuate a perceived positive?
For starters, Key himself is an example of someone who found the path to success led overseas. In the very same interview in which he lamented the brain drain he described his own career trajectory from youthful OE in Australia to high-flying banking jobs in Singapore and London, albeit interspersed with stints back in New Zealand.
It's not that this makes him a hypocrite, but it doesn't seem to have occurred to Key (or it's simply too inconvenient to consider) that being a stable and educated part of the vaunted global economy - something he clearly approves of - comes with all kinds of inevitable consequences and opportunities, of which he himself has been a beneficiary.
It's a package deal - you can't expose a country and its offspring to the wonders of the free market and expect them not to be tempted. You can't prepare young people for the challenges of competing in the "global workplace" without expecting them to do just that.
Still, Key insists on describing the departure to Australia of so many people as an "exodus". It suits him to paint the situation in such Biblical terms, because he is being positioned as a Prime Minister-in-waiting who will address the reasons so many New Zealanders apparently see no long term future here. I look forward to the day when he likens them to the Israelites escaping captivity in a latter-day Egypt - with the subtle implication that he might be just the modern Moses to lead them home, parting the Tasman's waters in the process.
I guess that depends on how religious he is feeling that week.
Key's ten commandments - were they to number that many - concern lifting New Zealand's living standards, wages, productivity and educational levels to the point where we are once again competitive with our nearest neighbour. With fewer disincentives to living here, the argument goes, the more people won't be tempted by the fruits of Australia's Eden.
The irony is that he will have to continue - indeed accelerate - Labour's policy of ameliorating the worst ideological excesses of the 1980s and 90s if he really wants to play catch up. Forget about personal tax cuts - sometimes touted as a short-term cure for the latest emigration figures - they are all but cosmetic given the real wage disparities involved. The challenge lies in dealing with a legacy of socio-economic vandalism.
From the mid 80s and on through the 90s the great experiment in price stability succeeded in creating a low inflation, low growth, low wage economy. The Reserve Bank fiddled around with "headline" and "underlying" inflation rates while ordinary wage-earners saw their stagnant incomes steadily eroded by the increasing cost of living. With unemployment so high at the time they had little bargaining power, and even less once the Employment Contracts Act was passed. You can't moan about poor wages and conditions now without at least a passing reference to the years of deliberate government policies aimed at forcing wages down and trashing the collective bargaining power of workers.
Meanwhile in Australia, experiencing the same pressures to modernise but resisting the fundamentalist free market zealotry taking hold in New Zealand, a flexible mix of state-union accords and bargained compromise allowed the inevitable transition to happen with less pain and greater long-term economic strength. You can argue, as many do, that this is all ancient history. But that only goes to show how long it is taking us to recover.
Anyway, as Helen Clark and Michael Cullen learned early on in their first term, moving too quickly to rebuild the economic pillars of social democracy will be met with stiff and ruthless opposition by the financial and business elites - the same people who simultaneously lament the country's lagging performance and loss of skilled workers to other countries.
It strikes me Key is all too ready to portray the problems as dire and dreadful, all the while avoiding any talk of solutions as radical as such terrible circumstances would seem to demand. Since Key has had to reposition National as a party of the centre right, rather than whatever it was when Brash was leader, he is essentially left with little ideological wiggle room. He can't really out-Labour Labour. But how long or effectively he can resist the pressure from the right of his own party to revert to type is the big question.
It's worth remembering that Key's elevation to leader of the National Party was less than glorious. His predecessor Don Brash had come a cropper over the infamous Hollow Men election funding scandal, to which Key was a bit of a sideshow, escaping with only minor cosmetic bruising. He might have received the odd email himself, but he didn't open them, he claimed. He might have been in the loop when election funding and strategies were discussed, but he never knew about any pamphlets. He did not have email relations with those Brethren! He did not inhale!
It was all a little shabby in my opinion. And from that moment I began wondering how far John Key could be trusted. I also wondered if Nicky Hager's follow-up to The Hollow Men would be titled The Shallow Men.
National had once again gambled on an outwardly marketable but essentially unproven figurehead. They had their reasons, not the least being the evident dearth of leadership talent among their senior parliamentary ranks. But one could be forgiven for being a little leery of all this. Brash's real legacy to his adoptive party was not so much the revival of their electoral fortunes - which, arguably, would have occurred naturally anyway after the rout of 1999 – as it was a reliance on spin and image control. Even at his demise, supposedly senior journalists were fawning over the "gentleman Don" image and Mr Nice Guy hokum that had become the media script.
And straight away the next script was being written, with John Key floating up in the polls on nothing more than a few vox pop platitudes and well-rehearsed state-house-to-million-dollar-mansion cliches. As one unkind commentator put it upon hearing Key's first speech as leader, he doesn't so much have a vision or a dream as "aspirations going forward".
Perhaps it's inevitable that to begin with we know comparatively little about a new leader's guiding philosophies, their true agendas, their view of the world beyond their personal areas of expertise. But it still surprises me how many people were willing to give the thumbs up to a guy who remained for all intents and purposes an unknown quantity.
What we must really hope, however, is that Key is not an unknown quantity to himself. When the smoke from Hager's gun cleared what became most apparent was that Brash was beset on all sides by clamouring, nagging, demanding, priggish, ambitious, contradictory and sometimes ridiculous voices, all wanting to influence their man's public persona.
Again, maybe a lot of that is to be expected at the top levels of politics, but one of the qualities of a real leader is to be able to withstand that pressure from the kind of special pleaders, lobbyists and haughty sense-of-entitlement ear-benders that plagued Brash.
Key will require intellectual stamina and a sense of personal conviction to avoid becoming just another poster boy for tax cuts and privatisation. The usual suspects named in The Hollow Men will be as busy as ever, just more mindful of the perils of email. About the best we can say for Key right now is that Ruth "I am a patient man" Richardson doesn't approve and has branded him "Cullen lite".
Well, there is another thing in his favour, and that is his deputy. Bill English has been hard done by in many ways, including now having to walk three paces behind the man who backed Brash over him in they dirty leadership coup that began all this unpleasantness in the first place. Hindsight is a wonderful and useless thing, but it's worth imagining what might have happened had National been cunning enough to let Jenny Shipley take the fall in 2002 and then installed English as the comeback kid. Instead of being branded a loser, he might well have capitalised just as effectively on second term disaffection with Labour but, unlike Brash, been able to assemble a viable coalition government.
The problem with that "what if?" is that Shipley was jettisoned because of her association with the hardline policies the electorate had just repudiated. English was supposed to represent the kinder, gentler face of National, but the damage was too great and Labour's momentum too strong for any miracle recovery.
When English was peremptorily rolled for Brash it struck many of us that this might prove counterproductive in the long run. Conventional wisdom has it that Brash led National to within a whisker of power, but that ignores both his unwillingness to build alliances and his doctrinaire monetarism that was at odds with majority opinion. At the next election National will have been out of power for as long as they held it last time. That is long enough for anyone to have worked out that New Zealand doesn't want extremists in power.
Hence, in my opinion, the switcheroo they've pulled and the careful positioning of Key as a supposedly credible alternative to Labour without actually standing for anything much at odds with Labour. It's a political ideology I have dubbed "National Socialism" – again, I'm being facetious, and I don't imagine Key and his cohorts are ready to break out the brown shirts after this year's election.
If anything, my silly sobriquet makes National sound more interesting than it really is. As mentioned earlier, Key can't even express a position on the hop, as we witnessed most recently when Cullen changed the foreign ownership rules during the bidding process of Auckland Airport, and Key was caught between wanting to be anti-Labour yet not appear pro-foreign ownership of strategic assets.
It's a beige tightrope he's been walking since the beginning. Go back even further to his first speech as leader. Instead of the headline grabbing Orewa antics of Brash, he mumbled a few platitudes about being worried about our supposedly growing underclass. The media would have much preferred that he launched into some tirade about the undeserving poor, perhaps suggesting the time had come for a proper debate about compulsory sterilisation, the return of capital punishment for the worst violent offenders, an IQ-based means test for prospective parents ...
Instead, having worked out that divisive messages have a downside even if the headlines run your way for a while, Key played the great uniter. If "the Kiwi way" lacked the oomph of Brash's "iwi/Kiwi" billboard populism, no one could take much offence from it, either. New leader praises motherhood and apple pie shock!
What little he offered in the way of tangible proposals were just as beige, including the by now anodyne notion of work-for-the-dole, a rote response to the vexed issue of welfare dependency that's proven time and again to be easier said than done.
It's very hard to tell how sincerely Key himself holds these views, as his speech writers appear to lack much verve, and he is what we might charitably call charismatically challenged. As for the state-house-to-self-made-man media morality play we're all meant to assume underpins his philosophies, forgive my scepticism. Key's origins were humble enough, for sure, but that only places him in the fine company of a great many New Zealanders who enjoyed the embrace of a benign welfare state, a system that helped lift the prospects of many beyond whatever version of modern serfdom they might have experienced had it not been there to intervene.
When people describe that old New Zealand as a classless society, that's basically what they're talking about - not that there weren't rich and poor, but that what passed for a middle class was enormously broad and relatively cohesive. To be fair, Key acknowledges this when he speaks of the opportunities he had despite his background.
Being from precisely the same generation as John Key I recognise the country he describes. I played with kids like him from homes a bit like his. We all went to state schools and played in the same sports teams and got into the same trouble. Some of us had two parents, some only one. Some had second hand cars and others brand new ones. And a boat. Some had big houses and others little boxy ones built by the government, often just a street away. Some mums worked, some didn't. None of us wore shoes in summer.
It doesn't surprise me that someone like Key might have gone on to make a fortune using his nous - because he was not underprivileged and there was no hidebound class system pushing him back down where he belonged.
What doesn't seem to have occurred to Key, given that he seems to believe that there was no "underclass" such as exists today back when he was pulling himself up by his bootstraps in "the Kiwi way", is that the world he now inhabits and which made him rich might also have something to do with the rise of the new untouchables he now laments.
The liberated finance markets that floated Key's boat were ushered in by the same political forces that slashed benefits, sold assets, closed entire industries and opened an ever-widening income gap. You can't keep arguing that today's problems are not linked to the culture of individualism and consumerism encouraged by the past two decades of free market policies. It defies logic that the crumbling edges of society - those streets we're apparently all too scared to walk down - aren't connected to the decision making centre.
Key would argue, I guess, that moral decline and the erosion of that all-important sense of community are products of Labour's failed "mishmash" of policies - and he'd be right to some extent if he could admit that this was because Labour has essentially maintained the free market status quo while trying to ameliorate its worst excesses. Attempting to outflank Labour on that front will only lead to a different mishmash, I'm afraid.
Shorn of its party political references, Key's speech was little more than a sentimental view of the past combined with a mildly dystopian version of the present, with the speaker casting himself as a man of sincere opinion and homespun wisdom. For all the professed desire to lift those currently mired in long-term unemployment and hopelessness out of their misery, or to stem the tide of economic refugees flooding across the Tasman, Key still seems an unlikely social engineer, let alone revolutionary.
If the issues are as big as he suggests, surely the policies should be correspondingly bold and imaginative. I think there is scope for this – and since I'm in an educational institution, I'd recommend a massive investment in this sector, from pre-school to pure research, a long term programme designed to eventually break the cycles of disadvantage, crime, poor health and all the other symptoms of a society that doesn't value its young – or those who teach them – enough.
But politics has long ceased to be about anything much more than a poll driven popularity contest and right now the audience likes the contestant in blue.
More than anything Key's political star has risen at the expense of Helen Clark's. Rightly or wrongly, she is perceived by enough voters now as the figurehead not only of a certain party, but of a style of politics – interfering, overbearing, feminist, socialist, politically correct, the nanny state embodied.
For whatever reasons, a large enough chunk of the electorate has tired of her. This aversion to her style, personality, gender even, strikes me as irreversible. And while she cannot reinvent herself, others have been busy inventing John Key.
Weirdly, though, I see Clark's lasting victory lying in having forced National to come up with someone like Key. They say the times throw up the man, and perhaps we live in bland times. But by having usurped (or perhaps repositioned) the centre of New Zealand politics for three terms, the Clark Labour Government has dragged National leftwards in the process. They tried veering right but it didn't work. John Key represents, in the market parlance he would understand, a correction. The paradox being, to take the very long term historical view, if you want to blame anyone for the rise and rise of John Key, blame Helen Clark.
This talk was delivered by Finlay Macdonald as part of the Distinguished Communicator Lecture Series for the Centre for Science Communication, Otago University, April 2, 2008.
It is based on a series of columns written for the Sunday Star-Times over several years.