John Key’s a political poker player, and in poker there’s an old maxim about projection. When people are stuck in weak position, they go out of their way to project strength. It's how you try to get out of a tricky position.
We’ve seem plenty that from him in Parliament already.
From the outside, Parliament’s question time might look like a battle of ideas between government and opposition MPs, with the media observing from the sidelines. But it isn’t. No MP seriously thinks their questions and responses are going to sway the opinions of the people across the aisle.
Question time is actually a bizarre love triangle, with the government and opposition courting the affections of the media. Media don’t report on who won the prize; the media reports are the prize.
That’s why it’s helpful to think about Key’s answers to questions so far.
Andrew Little’s been concentrating on promoting his three years fee-free study policy. A representative Key response:
From what I can see from Labour’s trumped-up policy it announced on a Sunday afternoon—which is getting no traction so they keep coming to the House with it… go and have a look at the column inches and see how many you have got: zero.
There’s two claims in there: First, Labour’s getting “zero” column inches and no traction with its policy. And second, it’s a sign of weakness when you ask about an issue in Parliament.
Both claims are silly, and pretty obviously silly. On the idea that nobody cares for Labour’s announcement, for example:
Labour needed to start the year with a splash and so it did. It announced three years of free education… A reduction in student debt is a good thing. People will enter the workforce owing less, and that has to be a good thing. More people will study, and anything driving up the numbers of tertiary -educated people is a bonus.
Labour's first major policy announcement of the year is in, giving Andrew Little the "speech-idol" laurels at the start of the political year… So far National has tried a number of attack lines on the "fee-free three" idea, but it has looked more like flailing than finely-honed critique.
If National wants to argue at next year's election that an entitlement to three years' free tertiary education is unaffordable, it cannot be offering tax cuts. If it thinks a tax cut will be more appealing to voters than relief from student fees and loans, it may be mistaken.
So much for “no traction” and “zero column inches.” Key would, of course, much rather live in a world where Labour’s start to the year had got no traction. That just isn’t the world he’s actually living in.
Key’s second idea, that parties bring their weak issues to the House rather than their strong ones, runs counter to everything we know about courtship. If you’re in a bizarre love triangle with the news media, you put your best foot forward, not your weakest.
We know this from Key’s own behavior when he was opposition leader. In 2008 his three top question time topics were tax cuts, the Winston Peters / Owen Glenn scandal, and the number of Kiwis moving to Australia. Do those sounds like National’s weak points from 2008? Not so much.
So, if the claims are so silly, then why is Key making them?
It’s because he wants to bluff the media into reporting that Labour’s policy is “getting no traction” has “zero column inches” and so on. He’s betting that the media are bluffable, and that he can change the media’s narrative from the top down. There may have been a time when that he could bluff some commentators that way. It was part of his long political honeymoon. But, like Audrey Young, I think that time is over.
Key protesteth too much that Labour’s fee-free is a dog. It’s a tacit admission the policy’s doing well. It’s weakness projecting as strength.