Polity by Rob Salmond

Last month, I was very fortunate to accompany Andrew Little as he traveled for five days of meetings in Washington and New York.

The trip was to assist Andrew in his preparation to become Prime Minister. For many years, opposition leaders have had travel funds available for this specific purpose. It’s important for New Zealand that their new PM is ready to go, across all facets of their job, on day one.

Andrew engaged with Administration and Hill leaders on the US / New Zealand relationship and on US views about major global issues. He talked with the UN about what they may need from New Zealand in future years. He learned from the policy insights of leading think-tanks. And he engaged with some of the US progressive community as they prepare to battle for Americans’ support once more.

Being in the room for a wide-ranging agenda like this, in two of the world’s most important centres of power, is a professional prize for an anorak like me. But it was also a really good chance to see New Zealand’s next Prime Minister in action on the international stage.

Biased as I am, I can honestly say I was impressed. Here’s why:

Openness: Andrew specifically wanted to hear from all sides of the major debates. He’s not a guy who wants to hear from only people who agree with him. That’s why he insisted on engaging about future of work issues not just with the AFL-CIO (America’s union movement) and other progressive think tanks, but also with world-leading economist Jeffrey Sachs, and with senior staff at financial institutions in New York including Westpac, Goldman Sachs, and Barclays Capital. (I’d be interested to see whether John Key’s engage much with offshore union movements on his economic missions …)

Andrew also met with pro-TPP leaders in the administration and on Capitol Hill as well as more hesitant Members of Congress, and lobbyists on both sides of the issue.

Andrew wants to hear all the arguments, and engage with people from all points of view. Obviously he won’t agree with everyone, but every major view gets an airing. When Andrew says he wants to be a “Prime Minister for every New Zealander” I think that’s what he means.

Authenticity: Andrew didn’t pander to anyone. Last year he made a forceful public argument about the how the TPP undermines our sovereignty. In Washington and in private, he made the exact same argument – and just as powerfully – when he met a senior official (and the chief TPP negotiator) from the US Trade Representative. Having seen that consistency across multiple topics now, I’m happy to trust that the points he makes in my hearing are also the points he makes when I’m not around. That’s comforting – and sadly becoming all too rare – in a political leader.

Intellect and stamina:  Andrew was the centre of attention for 40 high-level meetings across five days. Some were half an hour, others an hour and a half. Each meeting had a new brief; each briefing had a new set of potential issues coming from the other side.  Of those 40 calls, only one was based mainly on Andrew’s personal interests – a really lively discussion with US Supreme Court Judge Stephen Breyer. The other 39 were all business.

As a staffer in those meetings, I had it easy. If the subject matter was labyrinthine or outside my comfort zone, I could concentrate on getting the notes right but didn’t need to follow every comment, and knew the heat wouldn’t suddenly turn on me. To wit: My notes tell me Andrew met at one point with a “CTED / CTITF roundtable about ongoing UNSC / UNGA cooperation under UNSC 1292, 2168 in building global capacity to combat ISIL.” I’m still not totally sure what that sentence means.

Andrew wasn’t so lucky. Across a massively broad sweep of topics, the heat was always on him. His views received the most attention in the room. Any slip and everyone would notice. Every comment was directed mostly at him. He was under permanent scrutiny, both in what he said and how he said it. And he carried it off with ease. Competent, confident, almost casual.

For me, two of the best indicators of someone who can step up from MP to PM are their ability to engage deeply across a wide range of issues, and their ability to cope with the demands of sustained periods in the spotlight.

On the strength on my week staffing him in the US, Andrew passes those tests easily. Open, authentic, smart, hard-working. That’s what every country looks for in its leader.

Mike Hosking’s opinion piece in Thursday’s Herald contained two good points. First, he cuts through the fog about mid-term polling:

Poor old TV3 was trying to beat up the John Key line over protecting rapists and murderers, and seemed confounded by the fact that the Labour Party was up in arms about it, yet somehow this wasn't reflected in their latest poll…

The media, especially the political media, follows in microscopic detail every utterance and nuance, and seems continually amazed that very little if any of it makes it outside the beltway and into the daily subconscious.

Hosking is right, much to the annoyance of everyone – on all sides – in the Thorndon bubble.

At this point in the cycle, single events usually don’t move the polls. Whether it’s rants about rapists, increased benefit levels, provocative housing data, or Saudi sheep shenanigans, much of the public aren’t tuned in to politics, so they don’t notice the events and don’t change their mind because of them.

Most lower-interest swing voters are currently tuned out. And the politics junkies who remain engaged usually have stronger allegiances; so don’t change their mind, either.

No wonder the polls are only moving slowly.

Yes, there’s the Brash-at-Orewa counterexample. But while Orewa shows single events can conceivably jolt the mid-term polls, it’s still a very rare event.

Second, and more important, is Hosking’s prediction about 2017:

But let us look to the latter part of next year and indeed into 2017 election year, and here's what will matter, what will shift polls and potentially shift the Government out of office.

Jobs.

He’s right.

Jobs matter to people. For many, it’s visceral. It’s an issue where the government is weak. And it’s an issue where the opposition has strength.

The economy is growing, and so it should be easier for people to find work. But jobs are getting harder to find, not easier, and it’s going to get worse. That’s what the unemployment figures show, and it’s not good.

National’s response has been to distract and confuse.

“But we have more jobs than ever before,” they say. That’s a canard, because we have more people than ever before, too. Duh. The health of the job market has always been measured on ease of finding a job, which is reflected in the unemployment rate, not the raw number of jobs.

National also says its critics have amnesia. Don’t they remember the GFC, or the earthquakes?

Again, it’s a distraction. High unemployment today has very little to do with the GFC or the earthquakes. Here’s an unemployment chart from Trading Economics, which I’ve annotated to show the GFC and earthquakes:

The chart shows increased unemployment in 2009 wasn’t National’s fault. That was the GFC. It’s also clear, and intuitive, that the Canterbury earthquakes had little lasting impact on nationwide unemployment.

But the relatively high (6-7%) unemployment lasted a full six years from the GFC, until the start of 2014. It’s hard to blame the 2008 GFC for 2014 era unemployment, especially when – as Hosking notes – our banking system wasn’t hit as hard as others’, and their unemployment rates have fallen more quickly than ours:

For all the growth and success and rock star headlines, you have to have something tangible to show for that. A rising unemployment rate isn't a good look.

If things continue the way they appear to be going, then we'll be getting spanked by other countries.

Australia is trending down, Britain has the lowest unemployment rate in eight years and America's rate is in the 5 per cent area. We're dragging the chain.

The trend is for things to get worse again in 2016. National’s response should be to get off its butt and start helping businesses to generate enough jobs for our people.

But the track record suggests otherwise. It suggests excuse-making, instead. And that will make jobs a top-tier election issue.

Labour already says it’s going to make jobs the centerpiece of its election pitch. Here’s Andrew Little:

Ask me my three priorities as Labour Leader?

Jobs. Jobs. Jobs.

You can ask me my top ten as well but I think you get the gist.

Little thinks the government can help businesses create jobs, especially in this rapidly changing economic environment. That’s the challenge he gave to Grant Robertson’s Future of Work Commission.

It sounds like the commission’s big ideas will start coming out late in 2016, giving them a full public airing through election year. That gives plenty of time for jobs to develop as the election-deciding issue.

Labour’s election theme will on jobs most of all, with strong pitches on housing, health, and poverty, too. As I said the other day, the early signs point to a very tight race.

We’re closing in on the end of the first full year of the electoral term. So how are things shaping up for 2017?

Let’s start with the current polls. Taking an average of the last 6, they show the left-bloc (Labour, Greens) polling around 43%, up around 7% since last year’s election, or up 6% if you call Internet/Mana “left bloc.” The right bloc (National, Conservatives, ACT, UF) scores an average of around 49%, down  little more than 3% from 2014. Centrist parties (NZF, Maori Party) are on around 8%, down a couple from 2014.

That’s a pretty good year of recovery for the left, but of course it isn’t yet enough. If the next election were held right now, you’d very likely see another National-led government.

But the next election isn’t being held right now. It isn’t for nearly two years. So the big question isn’t so much“where do we sit right now,” but whether we’ll see the broad trend of voters drifting from right to left continue through to 2017.

The online prediction market iPredict suggests it will.

Bearing in mind all the caveats about shallow markets and online prediction, iPredict’s vote share markets suggest a really interesting picture post-2017.

The charts above show the probability that iPredict investors give to parties achieving various vote shares. The vote share they think a party is 50% likely to achieve (that is, equally like to achieve it and not achieve it) is the closest we have to the market’s best guess today about the 2017 election.

On that basis, here’s where the market thinks we’re most likely to land after the next election:

• National: 42%

• Labour: 36%

• Greens: 11%

• NZF: 7%

• Others: 4% between all of them.

That result represents a continuation of current trends. It suggests the left picking up another 5% over the next 22 months, and the right losing another 5% or so.

 As the comic (credit: xkcd) shows, there are all sorts of potential problems with simply assuming current trends will run into the future, but nonetheless the punters at iPredict are picking it as the most likely outcome.

Should the election come out that way, New Zealand First would have an interesting decision to make. Winston would have to weigh up the fact that more people voted for a change in PM than voted for the current one, and the fact he really dislikes Key, against the fact he’d get more power as #2 to National than as #3 to Labour and the Greens.

He would face the choice between again being a larger part of thwarting plurarity preference for a change in direction, and again propping up a decaying government, or being a smaller part of a vibrant, new direction for New Zealand.

iPredict seems to think Winston will choose National more than he’ll choose Labour in that situation. They give National a 58% chance of remaining in power, despite suggesting the right will most likely lose to the left by a substantial margin. They think that for Winston peters, more-power-for-me trumps giving-effect-to-the-collective-will.

Of course, Peters’ ability to choose for New Zealand depends on Labour and the Greens not getting to about 49% - at that point they’re probably home as a two-way coalition, or at least able to govern with UF or the Maori Party rather than Winston. The iPredict most likely scenario isn’t far short of that.

On the flip side, for the left to rise above a combined 42% - let alone touch 49% -  it will need both Labour and the Greens to perform well, remain disciplined, and capture the imagination of ever more of the population over the next two years. But as this last year has shown, they’re up for the fight.

Prediction: Cliffhanger.

This week John Key attempted to engineer a farce in our parliament, to obscure his own weakness in standing up to Australia’s new, shabby deportation policy.

Aided – whether deliberately or not – by a confusing and inconsistent set of rulings from Speaker David Carter, the result is that New Zealand is yet again an international laughing stock. I can hear John Oliver warming up right now …

The part that will disappoint Key the most is that his dead cat gambit didn’t entirely work.

The gambit works if people both start talking about your outrageous remark, and also stop talking about the issue that forced you to throw the dead cat in the first place.

Certainly people talked about Key’s offensive remark, as they should. People who say offensive, derogatory things should be called out on it.

But Key didn’t achieve his second goal. From revelations that Key was wrong about what kind of offenders on Christmas Island, to the breaking of ranks by the Maori Party and Peter Dunne, people are still talking about Christmas Island, its New Zealand detainees, and Australia’s cruel new policy.

People are also still talking about Key’s weakness in criticising Australia’s policy, and his inability to get it changed. That’s actually quite a big risk for Key – among international leaders, he looks like the guy people are happy to hang out with, but not listen to.

Did Key’s friendship with Stephen Harper get us a TPPA concession on dairy? Nope. And now his friendship with Malcolm Turnbull seems to have got us nothing regarding these detainees.

Not only did the gambit fail to distract people, it came with collateral damage to National, too.

One of the issues with the dead cat strategy, and a reason Crosby almost certainly preaches caution before deploying it, it that it makes quite a mess. Key’s made two messes this week.

The first mess is Key’s status with middle-class women, many of whom swapped from voting for Helen Clark to supporting him, and are central to his ongoing success. Many women, all too often due to previous personal trauma, also react vehemently to any suggestion that rape is being used as plaything in a Parliamentary parlour game, or that their position on Australia’s policy has anything at all to do with their support for rapists. As Rob Hosking (paywall) has pointed out, that damage will take some effort to undo.

The second mess that Key and Carter face is having to explain their many contradictory or illogical comments. Toby Manhire has a starting selection.

We can analyse the logic or illogic of Key’s and Carter’s statements all we like, and it is a fun sport, but the point of the exercise from National’s perspective wasn’t to be logical, but to be distracting.

National’s goal was to stage an Orwellian Alice in Wonderland, right in the middle of our parliament.

Certainly they failed to be logical, and certainly they failed to effectively stand up for the interests of New Zealanders – here at home and on the Island. But they also failed to distract New Zealand from those important issues around justice and community safety. That’s why they failed.

Will this be kept alive when parliament resumes next week? My guess would be no, because John Key’s not in Wellington next week. The next time Key faces the House is 1 December, by which time we’ll have probably moved to other matters.

The one caveat to that comes from the UK. A 51-year old British citizen, who moved to Australia 50 years ago, is being deported back to Britain under the new rules. His crime involves a scrub fire.

It will be very interesting to see whether David Cameron displays the same weakness in accepting this policy. For Britain, this new policy is history in reverse, and I expect they won’t take kindly to it. If Britain applies pressure, it would place new, embarrassing acid on John Key to explain his lack of a backbone.

John Key’s strategic supremo is Lynton Crosby, from the Australian firm Crosby/Textor. Crosby has a trick in his bag called the “dead cat strategy.” Here’s Boris Johnson, one of Crosby’s British clients, describing it in 2013:

If you’re losing an argument, if you’re in a weak position, throw a dead cat on the table, the London mayor wrote.

“Everyone will shout ‘Jeez, mate, there’s a dead cat on the table!’; in other words they will be talking about the dead cat, the thing you want them to talk about, and they will not be talking about the issue that has been causing you so much grief.”

Today, John Key threw a dead cat into the middle of New Zealand’s Parliament.

John Key knew he was in a weak position today for two reasons. First, his deliberate inaction in the face of disgraceful treatment of expat New Zealanders by Australia is a dereliction of his duty, as his many advisers will be telling him.

Second, his Labour opponents have just completed an annual conference that far outshone expectations, capped by a rousing address from Andrew Little, buoying professionals and activists alike across the New Zealand left.

So Key decided to get rid of all those long-term negative headlines by gifting the media a short-term negative headline instead. That’s the strategic thinking behind Key’s disgraceful performance in Parliament today, when he said any politician looking for humane treatment for detainees on Christmas Island was “backing the rapists” and “putting yourself on the side of sex offenders.” Here’s the video:

Make no mistake – this was no passionate outburst. It was a coldly calculated tactic, cynically designed to remove stories about Key’s inaction and Labour’s conference from the media.

The dead cat got even more prominence because the Speaker of the House, National’s David Carter, inexplicably ruled that it is perfectly fine within Parliament’s rules to accuse MPs of “backing rapists” or “putting yourself on the side of sex offenders.”

Bear in mind that Parliament’s rules are so tight that calling someone a liar or a hypocrite are automatically ruled out of order, and you can’t even refer to an MP being absent from the House chamber.

Some might wonder whether the Prime Minister and the strictly impartial Speaker of the House from his own party might have conspired to make the dead cat as big and hairy as possible, so nobody would talk about anything else.

I, of course, couldn’t possibly speculate on that.

Right on cue, everyone who follows in politics exclaimed: “Jeez, mate, there’s a dead cat accusation of backing rapists on the table!” and stopped talking about anything else.

I can’t fault anyone for doing that – because that accusation really did sit there on the table, with the Speaker pointedly refusing to clear it off.

But it’s important we all understand where the accusation came from.

It’s not that Key is necessarily ashamed of his inaction on Christmas Island – in fact, I think he’s proud of it. It’s that Key understands full well he’s got a weak argument - telling people locked in a detention centre that’s on fire that they’re “free to go” and “there voluntarily” just doesn’t pass the smell test.

Key doesn’t win just because we all looked at his dead cat. But he does win if we wake up tomorrow having forgotten about the important issues that lead him to throw the dead cat in the first place. We, all of us, cannot allow that.