Island Life: A devious and dangerous political operative
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the pithy observation that modern politics was 'the shadow cast upon society by big business'
And he hadn't even heard of John Key....
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Damn, another book to buy. And I already have too many to read...
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Damn, another book to buy. And I already have too many to read...
And not a short one, either ...
One interesting thing to emerge from the interview is that characters who are essentially grey men in Michael King's Penguin History emerged quite differently in Chris's book. King found them boring, Chris sees them as very interesting villains.
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First stop in the morning is the bookstore!
I've always been convinced the key difference between Labour and National is Labour is a party at least founded upon a progressive principle; National has always been (with perhaps a small interregnum of the post-WW2 consensus under Holyaoke) the party primarily concerned with looking after its backers - farmers and the business elite.
Its cause for pause to consider that Brashite politics is not an aberration, but merely business as usual for our business elites.
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...and Coates was looking for ways to weather the storm. As the first New Zealand prime minister actually born in this country
Bzzz!
The intellectually brilliant Francis Henry Dillon Bell beats Coates as the first NZ born PM (though admittedly it was only for a short time). Still - it was a damn good read and I'll probably have to find some room on my bookshelves for it... -
I always read Trotter's work or at least take a look at it, despite coming from the other side of the political divide.
The occasions I only glance at it are when he gets right into his more melodramatic type of writing.
Melodrama is always inaccurate. It relies on shining white good guys and big bad bogeymen. It is the same kind of thinking as produces the drive on too many of our news shows (and I use the word "shows" rather than "programmes" deliberately) to have a clear good guy and a clear bad guy.
(Unlike many on the centre-right, for example, I don't see Helen Clark as head of a villainous Stalanist Satanist lesbian cabal. She is much too smart to be that)
When he isn't being melodramatic, Trotter is one of our most perceptive political writers. The excerpt printed above makes me a bit less keen than I was to get this book.
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But entirely absent from that dispiriting December evening in 1931 is the great surge of hope and relief that will fl ow through the working class communities of New Zealand in four years' time. To be sure, the ravages of the Depression have boosted the size of Labour's 'democratic public' from a quarter to a third of the dominion's population, but in rural and provincial centres the new 'National' government of Forbes and Coates continues to hold sway.
Labour was damned 'lucky' Mr Davy was around to secure 1931s victory for National, considering the whole world went to hell in the 1931 - 1935 period. This was 2 years prior to the New Deal began and anything we did alone would have been very vulnerable.
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National has always been (with perhaps a small interregnum of the post-WW2 consensus under Holyaoke) the party primarily concerned with looking after its backers - farmers and the business elite.
This may be true but behind that concern is surely a belief that those sectors drive wealth and wellbeing. You don't have to agree with that analysis to see that it is not a "villainous" position to hold.
My politics may not have changed much over the years but my sense of righteousness has. I think Trotter and other are too convinced of being right and others being wrong to offer much new insight, IMvHO.
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My politics may not have changed much over the years but my sense of righteousness has. I think Trotter and other are too convinced of being right and others being wrong to offer much new insight, IMvHO.
I certainly couldn't lure him into any nuance over the reforms of the 80s, and the book depicts the end of the ruinous farm subsidies system like it's a bad thing, but Chris just makes no bones about where he comes from.
Speaking of agriculture, how damn rich did the dairy farmers get yesterday?
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Speaking of agriculture, how damn rich did the dairy farmers get yesterday?
Up to their eyeballs in white powder today :-) Scenes from Scarface flash up before me.
Still, I don't begrudge farmers their time in the sun. As I have said before the lamb growers are having a tough time and it's a precarious way to make a living.
Enlightened farmers aren't hard to find, BTW, I just wish thety had some more enlightened leadership as I fear for their European market presence.
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How rich dairy farmers get depends a lot on Fonterra's hedging strategy. Depending on that, they may not get much richer at all. And the poor old meat people are at the mercy of meat companies, who seem strangely reluctant to pass much on...
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And what the exchange rate does to things like petrol prices.
Oh, and interest rates. They've already de-coupled from the Reserve Bank's official cash rate, and if liquidity really becomes an issue they could go quite high.
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When he isn't being melodramatic, Trotter is one of our most perceptive political writers.
Well, I thiink today's effort in the DomPost today wasn't so such 'emlodramatic' as pure self-parody. But let's be honest about it, would Trotter be the media's favourite lefty (as a rather puffy piece in the new Metro puts it) if he couldn't come up with Manichaeistic soundbites at a rate of knots?
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OK, that sounded far too harsh - I doubt Trotter would appreciate the comparison, but he's a lot like Christopher Hitchens: intelligent, literate, writes a feel for language and a bitchy, pugnacious wit I find attractive. But, every so often, you trip over the peculiar hobby horses and Old Testament world view where there are angels (us) and devils (them) and absolutely nothing in between.
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Having been involved with two union-related events that Chris Trotter just got completely wrong, and I mean down to the most basic of facts, I can't help but think he's your archetypal armchair socialist, literally banging out his columns from an armchair in front of a blazing fire, glass of port in one hand and a meat pie the other.
He also gets the majority of his information from the trade union bar in Auckland, with his sources being whoever happens to be around at the time. This might go to explain how he is so often so incredibly wrong.
I also note that he refused to go to the Journalism Matters conference recently and then bagged it in the press. Perhaps this is because demanding proper journalistic standards might actually put him out of a job?
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but he's a lot like Christopher Hitchens
except for the height and drinking prowess. But there's a similarity of sorts in their rhetorical style. Sometimes you like what the write even when one disagrees but at others you dislike what they write even when one agrees.
The main problem I have with Trotter is that he has a rather romantic belief in a "working class" (which Labour is continuously in the process of betraying). I've come to the conclusion that there's a complex web of competing interests in society which changes from issue to issue.
But on the other hand I do share to a small extent his dislike of Identity Politics. But that's an eternal question - is the relationship to the means of production the essential contradiction?
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Well, while we are plugging histories of NZ, here is my new favourite, and from one of our greatest Prime Ministers no less!
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Well, while we are plugging histories of NZ, here is my new favourite, and from one of our greatest Prime Ministers no less!
Wow. Just wow.
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Some extracts:
The President of the United States possesses
more individual power in the way of moving armies and declaring war than any other monarch. This has always been the case.It was the habit of Americans to declare that they did not believe in standing armies or fleets. If they wanted to fight, they could afford to spend any amount of treasure; and they could do more in the way of organising than any nation in the world. They were not going to spend money on keeping themselves in readiness for what might never happen. But we have not now to consider the aerial ships from their warlike point of view.
Our scene opens in Melbourne, in the year 2000—a few years prior to the date at which we are writing. The Federal Parliament was sitting there that year. The Emperor occupied his magnificent palace on the banks of the Yarra, above Melbourne, which city and its suburbs possessed a population of nearly two millions.In a large and handsome room in the Federal buildings, a young woman of about twenty-three years of age was seated. She was born in New Zealand. She entered the local parliament before she was twenty.* At twenty-two she was elected to the Federal Parliament, and she had now become Under-Secretary of State for Home Affairs. From her earliest youth she had never failed in any intellectual exercise. Her intelligence was considered phenomenal. Her name was Hilda Richmond Fitzherbert
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WH,
When he isn't being melodramatic, Trotter is one of our most perceptive political writers.
Perhaps this is because demanding proper journalistic standards might actually put him out of a job?
I tend to agree that Chris Trotter is one of our best political writers, putting aside whatever that suggests about the quality of his competition. Its hard to find good writing in New Zealand, and we would definitely be worse off without him. (I'm not sure that the John Armstrong style of political writing even counts as journalism. Compare John's latest effort with Fran's.)
http://www.stuff.co.nz/4164368a1861.html#Scene_1
Confronting The New Zealand Herald is one of the truly depressing things returning New Zealanders must encounter when they board in Los Angeles or Singapore. Alongside the Financial Times or The Australian, its mix of parochial tub-thumping and eclectic superficiality underlines its last-bus- stop-on-the-planet origins.
So yeah, basically I think Chris is pretty good.
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What stands out, in Trotter's quest to tell a ripping yarn, rather than recount history, is the tenuous Hageresque threads he draws:
In the course of his sojourn in the US Davy would have become familiar with the ideas of the celebrated political journalist Walter Lippmann. During World War I, Lippmann had served alongside Edward Bernays — founder of the 'science' of public relations — on the Committee on Public Information, the US's wartime propaganda unit. Already hailed as America's most respected political commentator, Lippmann welcomed the new science of public manipulation as a 'revolution' in the 'practice of democracy'.
It's on the sole premise that Davy visited the United States, and Lippmann was a right wing political operator in the US, that Trotter can somehow claim that Davy was the eminence grise, without any political foundation.
This isn't history. This is story-telling, following the few exclusive strands of evidence with little connection to each other, that Trotter calls upon to present a pre-determined thesis.
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Hageresque? National has not disputed that the emails Hager highlights in his book are true. You're saying., then, Mr Prick, that Trotter is also telling the truth?
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He also gets the majority of his information from the trade union bar in Auckland, with his sources being whoever happens to be around at the time. This might go to explain how he is so often so incredibly wrong.
In the 1990s he lived in Dunedin, and I think he got a fair portion of his information from the corner bar of the cook every Friday afternoon.
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Undie 500 is coming up this weekend so Dunnes beware.
Trotter got it so wrong on the Smacking Bill didn't he.
If you're gonna be wrong might as well do it from the moral high ground. He wanted status quo and just lament the dreadful bashings of kiddies to continue. That said I still like to read him incase he's on target. -
Mark,
Is this the same Chris Trotter who excused any wrong doing by Labour re electoral funds back in 2005 because it kept those evil Nats who don't think like us away from government? I'm sure he said something about "good corruption". Does anyone have a link for that opinion piece he wrote?
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