Roger Douglas

You know there are some things in life you never think you will do.  Climb Everest is one, swim the Cook Strait is another.  But I really never thought I would:

- Defend Trevor Mallard.

Yesterday Trevor SMOGGED out badly in probably his worst gaffe to date since entering into the asymmetrical war cycle race with myself.  As a Labour Member of Parliament, the week after the Rufus Paynter affair while it is all a wee bit tense in the caucus and among the louder membership he posted this on this Facebook and tweeted to his loyal and faithful supporters:

Now to most of us on the right it is common sense.  We all agree and would share it on our Facebook wall in a second if our local MP posted it.  It is the most honest thing Trevor has ever put his name to.  He doesn’t like beneficiary bludgers any more than his colleagues from 1984, Sir Roger Douglas and Richard Prebble.

Trevor Mallard yesterday was a) a realist, b) a pragmatist and c) a brave endangered soul speaking truth to power.  Mallard is a “roofist”.  He believes Rufus Paynter is real and is actually a sickness beneficiary up on that roof rorting the system when he should be working.

But for a Labour MP the above constitutes beneficiary bashing to the general (declining) Labour membership.  It is demanded that you keep quiet if you are a roofist.  Rufus Paynter is not real and even if he was he is a legitimate beneficiary who needs more support.

Dare to question there are people refusing to work who are able to are the Labour “roofists”.  This is why it is such a bad SMOG.  Roofism splits in two his own membership and people in his electorate.  One that doesn’t exactly represent the “right end” of the country in employment and income statistics.  They let him have it and he deleted the post and tweet.  This then spewed out on to Newstalk ZB and over the news bulletins.  At this point even I was feeling sorry for Trevor.  Especially after David Cunliffe’s very obvious warning shots yesterday.

And this from Mickey Savage

This from some random Labour member

Thing is, these were the polite responses. Over at The Strandard Lynn Prentice’s hate blog all the Camp Cunliffe team were continuing their now ritual at least weekly flogging of Trevor.

I am getting pretty pissed off.

Ritual blog floggings of Trevor Mallard are MY job.

I cannot keep up with their level of hate over there.  It is all consuming.  I cannot hate Trevor Mallard as much as The Strandard Lynn Prentice’s hate blog.  They hate the man more than anyone in the National Party except Paula Bennett and Crusher.  I think even a random poll of Camp Cunliffe members would find John Key more popular than Trevor Mallard.  They blame him for everything that is wrong in the Labour Party.  The polling, the strategy and what Duncan Garner writes.  What do they thing he is? The Leader?

Even I do not believe Trevor is drunk when he posts or a fatty calcified deposit on the arteries of the left.

Wow.

So shame on Trevor Mallard, it is our job in the centre and far right to question why beneficiaries keep being paid for not working and questioning their “entitlements”.  The left cannot comment unless it is sympathy and the promise of a larger payday.  Even if your Leader agrees and is a Chief Roofist.

And shame on The Standard Lynn Prentice’s hate blog and Camp Cunliffe.

It is MY job to bash Trevor Mallard.  Know your role.

Bryce Edwards must believe like the rest of us now that David Shearer made up the “backstory” of the “guy on the roof” as he has compared this mythical character to Joe the Plumber and the Mondeo Man.  Edwards also reminds us of previous back stories.

New Zealand Labour has (so far): ‘guy sitting at his kitchen table in West Auckland doing his GST return’, ‘Rangitikei truck driver’, and now  ‘neighbour of sickness beneficiary painting his roof’.

David Shearer’s roof painting incarnation broke one of the basic rules of this (quite old and worn) political strategy. The negative attack on beneficiaries was actually audible to all – particularly Labour’s activist base – and as a result it has backfired badly. The neighbour has been forgotten and the focus has gone onto the beneficiary.

And that is where Shearer’s problems started.  He has created the “guy on the roof” to attack beneficiaries and many are Labour voters.  The centre vote do not mind holding beneficiaries to account as Paula Bennett has worked out but Labour’s left are running riot.  When Cactus Kate from the economic far right  applauded and highlighted the speech ten days ago as not unlike something Roger Douglas and Richard Prebble produced in their prime with ACT, Shearer should have known he would be upsetting his own foot soldier members.  As represented collectively and in comment threads on The St(r)andard and when Gordon Campbell put the boot in.

Last year before the election, I was chatting to a guy in my electorate who had just got home from work. In the middle of the conversation, he stopped and pointed across the road to his neighbour.

Once again I call on a real journalist to do their job and demand Shearer pass details to them so they can interview the specific man that spoke to Shearer and investigate the alleged beneficiary fraudster.  It is now a matter of Shearer’s credibility as he has reused and recycled this “guy on the roof” for some time now as not a general class of person but an individual, Rufus Paynter.

We all know he cannot breach either the privacy of the neighbour or the “guy on the roof” as it is all a fabrication.

ᔥ Cactus Kate:

Cactus is on holiday, so in between betting with the pedicure lady on how fast she could drink a bucket of booze (the pedicure lady lost) and lounging by the pool she has managed to look through David Shearer’s speech to the greedy oldies:

I found a copy of Shearer’s speech after his brag link on twitter and gave it a little pool read today and the whole thing was non-original, same-same, nothing new, nothing invigorating and I am actually sure I have heard plenty of the speech before only under the guise of ACT when it started. Most telling was the opening, just how Roger Douglas or Richard Prebble used to start one, with a narrative about bludgers to grab the attention of the audience.

Wow, sounds like Cactus might be downloading a Labour membership form.

I found the speech non-controversial, non fearsome and nothing in there that makes me think they are any different to National really.

Little wonder Shearer’s supporters don’t want Cunliffe back from his overseas jaunt during recess.

If I am not offended by the content then the genuine political left must be having kittens over Shearer by now. Forget the abysmal polling.

Shearer is proving to be about as right-wing and waffly with it in his social policy as Roger Douglas. No wonder his team are going to white-ant the only contender more left wing than Arnold Nordmeyer and capable of large scale tax increases that the left demand.

Of all recent Labour leaders I bet Shearer doesn’t even hold a faded crinkled picture of Michael Joseph Savage on the wall hanging in a rusty nail frame in his home study for friends to admire.

No wonder the base is all a flutter at the attack on their hero David Cunliffe.

The last time a Labour Leader or Senior MP called a beneficiary a bludger or that they needed a “nudge” (read – elbow) they were sitting around a table getting bloated eating fish and chips.

You mean this time Cactus?

National, through Steven Joyce’s strategic stupidity, have created an electoral environment that will make it very, very difficult for them to win power. Joyce choosing to protect his own power in 2011 means that 2014 onwards will be very, very difficult for National.

The saving grace for National is as the country works out that it has huge unfunded superannuation liabilities it will be forced to look at who can reduce the deficit the quickest, or who can save the most to put aside to fund entitlements for the old. Newer members of National’s caucus grew up admiring Roger Douglas and the changes he bought to New Zealand, releasing its potential through allowing the market to play a more important role.

National MPs currently in the house and likely to be around in 10 years time are fiscally a lot more conservative than the current group of wets, and ideologically driven more than poll driven. They will have credible, cogent solutions to the major problem of how we fund the state sector, especially if the next government is a weak Labour/ Greens one, where the Greens hare-brained schemes matched with a small Labour caucus over spend and alienate the population.

Leadership will be crucial. Ten years out it is hard to predict who will be leader, as they may not yet be in parliament. In a future post I will cover off potential leaders. Needless to say though the current lot who have their enforcers whisper idle threats into the ears of people who will outlive them politically by a considerable margin isn’t really doing anything to help. Threats of harming your career prospects in the future are only valid if you are going to be there int he future to deliver on those threats. List MPs only have an average political life expectancy of 6 years and so they can safely be ignored.

True leader design career paths for their MPs, and identify logical successors and nurture and mentor them.

Decline and Fall? Part II

As the cliché has it, a week is a long time in politics. There may never have been – at least in New Zealand – a better example of that maxim than the week of 13 to 19 September 2010. I began the week giving a speech on “three strikes” to a Rotary Club in East Auckland on the Monday evening. The “three strikes” law had passed, and I was doing everything I could to communicate to voters that it was a major policy win for ACT. By the following Friday, I had resigned from the ACT caucus in disgrace, and was on the run in the South Island, trying to shield my children from the howling dogs in the media who were trying to find us.

The reason for my downfall has been written about ad nauseum – including by me – and there is little point going over old ground here. Suffice it to say if Rodney’s trip to Europe was the first large nail in ACT’s coffin, for those whose agenda was personal aggrandizement rather than the interests of the party, my downfall was a godsend.

To the best of my knowledge, my friend Roger Douglas never joined the “Hide brought Garrett into the party and therefore it’s all his fault” bandwagon, although he certainly would not have been unhappy that Rodney was once again having to endure a grilling from both the media and those in the Party who were determined that he should be replaced.

WELLINGTON, NEW ZEALAND - MAY 03: ACT MP Heather Roy talks to media after the first ACT Party Caucus Meeting on May 3, 2011 in Wellington (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

Heather Roy however suddenly developed a serious case of amnesia about what had been discussed in my office in Albany when I disclosed the details of my sorry scam 27 years before. Following her own agenda, she was at the front of the “it’s all Hide’s fault” pack of baying hounds determined that my downfall would quickly be followed by Hide’s.

Following my resignation, I was largely out of the loop, but I record my everlasting gratitude to John Boscawen, who continued to extol my virtues and my achievement with “three strikes”, and was personally a great support to me and my family during the worst crisis of our lives. John Boscawen’s decision to leave politics immediately prior to the 2011 election was another mortal blow to the ACT Party. John is one of those rare people who no-one dislikes, but who also holds firmly to his principles, and is totally unafraid to stand out from the herd. I am very honoured to count him among my few true friends.

The real problem for Rodney following my departure was my replacement, Hilary Calvert, a long time ACT stalwart from Dunedin. From my limited acquaintance with her, Hilary is a delightful woman, but she quickly became known for a series of gaffes, and she provided even better sport for the left leaning media than I had been. More importantly, whereas with me the ACT caucus was firmly 3 -2 behind Rodney as leader, Hilary’s loyalties were soon revealed to be far less committed.

When the end came for Rodney seven months after her arrival, Hilary’s support for Don Brash over Rodney became decisive.

Don Brash – in many respects a most unlikely politician – had led National in 2005, and but for the debacle involving the Exclusive Brethren church, probably would have led National to victory in the election that year. There is certainly no doubt that his “Orewa” speeches about “one law for all” – another long time ACT policy – were directly responsible for the National Party virtually doubling their vote as compared with the previous election in 2002. The quite brilliant John Ansell billboards – the best of them the now legendary “Kiwi not iwi” series - reflected the concerns of middle New Zealand, and expressed in visual sound bites what Brash had articulated in much more detail in the speeches.

Following National’s defeat by a whisker in 2005, Brash was quickly replaced as leader by John Key, and Don largely disappeared off the political radar – although I do recall him not infrequently coming into the chamber and watching the proceedings from beside the Speaker’s chair, as all former MP’s are entitled to do. Clearly “the Don” was not finished with politics.

At one time, Brash was known among ACT insiders as “ACT’s tenth MP”. His sympathies were and clearly always had been in favour of the free market, limited government, a hard line on law and order, and no laws favouring one race of New Zealander over others – all key ACT policies. That notwithstanding, during February and March 2011, as it appeared more and more obvious that he would challenge Rodney for the leadership, no-one anywhere on the political spectrum could quite believe it. Political soufflés rarely rise twice – particularly in two different parties.

Two who did rise a second time were Brash – albeit fleetingly – and Peters.

Leaving aside differences in political principles and beliefs, the contrast between the wily, suave and teflon coated Peters and the bumbling Brash could not be more stark. That is the main reason no-one in ACT – or the media – initially took Brash seriously.

But by early 2011, ACT’s poll support was dismal, and major backers had deserted the Party. Brash promised that he would rejuvenate the Party’s fortunes – both in financial terms and in the polls. There is no doubt he truly believed that the 40% odd support National had gained in 2005 was down to him personally, and that were he to be leader, ACT’s support among voters would leap dramatically.

AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND - APRIL 28: Dr Don Brash speaks to the media after ACT leader Rodney Hide resigned.

As the “Mr Magoo” like Brash managed one astonishing and unexpected triumph after another in his drive for the leadership of ACT, the tide against Hide became stronger and stronger. Hilary Calvert – whose vote in support of Hide was crucial – changed sides a number of times. Eventually, even the loyal and stalwart John Boscawen came to believe that Rodney ought to step down for the good of the Party.

I firmly believe Rodney Hide always had the good of the Party – and the country – paramount in his mind. Although he has been accused of “selling out for the baubles of office”, I am convinced that is not the case. As a recent interview with the reptilian Guyon Espiner makes clear, once Rodney saw the writing clearly on the wall, he did his best to assist Brash carry off his coup – although he did draw the line when Brash asked him where he should park his car before administering the coup de grace at ACT headquarters in Newmarket, before a phalanx of eager reporters and their cameras

I watched that press conference from a back room, and after it was over, saw Rodney take Brash into a private meeting with then Chief of Staff Peter Keenan to discuss the mechanics of the handover. I was astounded at Hide’s dignity and apparent good humour, when a lesser man would, at the very least, have simply walked off and left Brash to it.

And so Dr Don Brash – who joined ACT on the day of the coup which made him leader – took over the reins of the party, firmly convinced that in short order he would deliver not the 15% of the vote which he publicly claimed, but the 40% he truly believed would defect from National and follow him to ACT. The third four inch nail in the ACT coffin – the first two being Rodney’s disastrous trip, and my departure in disgrace – was nailed home.

David Garrett phoned me about his series of guest posts. We disagree on his end hypothesis, but since I am not one to only publish echo chamber views here is his guest post about what he believes is the demise of the ACT party. There are two more parts.

Decline and Fall – the final ACT? (Part I)

The ACT party was formed by two former Ministers from opposite sides of the political divide – Derek Quigley and Roger Douglas. Both men had demonstrated that they were willing to think outside the political square in order to find “a better way” to improve the lives of all New Zealanders than had hitherto been offered by the two main parties. Both had also shown  they were not prepared to always toe the party line regardless of how silly or pointless they personally saw that  line to be.

At its height, ACT had nine MP’s, the best of which were superb – like Richard Prebble – and others whose names are now  virtually unknown. While in opposition, ACT MP’s could do little to change things. Ironically, arguably their most effective action – Rodney’s “perk busting”, which led to the revelation that  Labour  Speaker Jonathon hunt spent more than $20,000 on taxis in a year – later came back to haunt Rodney and ACT, and arguably begin the possibly terminal decline of the Party. Whether the decline is  terminal presently remains to be seen.

After almost being wiped out in 2005, in 2008 ACT got its big chance – five MP’s, and becoming a crucial support party to a centre right government led by National. In Rodney Hide, they had a leader who was certainly one of the smartest political operators in a generation.  In the “three strikes” policy upon which ACT had campaigned strongly, they had a policy and  draft legislation  that could potentially be supported by  National  – although the smart money at the time was that it would die in Select Committee – but be recognized and promoted  clearly as ACT and not National policy.

Unfortunately, the 2008 ACT caucus also contained the already germinating seeds of its own destruction in the form of Sir Roger Douglas and Heather Roy, a woman of limited intellect and even less personality,  who had hitherto made no impact at all on  public consciousness. Sir Roger, who I came to regard as a friend,  had a dislike of Rodney, the depth of which I did not understand,  either  then or now.

Roger fundamentally disagreed with the direction we took, which could be summarized as “help keep the centre right in power, and take our wins and the credit for them when we can.” It was a view which I thought was the right one, and one in  which I supported Rodney from the first to the last. Because he disagreed with that course, Roger was determined to replace Rodney with Heather Roy  as leader – at least initially –  and then, when he had gained enough experience, with John Boscawen.

Roy was always too stupid to realize that she was just a pawn, and that Roger’s promotion of her was merely a move in a longer game. Roy was supported in her delusions of ability by one Simon Ewing-Jarvie, a former army officer who became Roy’s most trusted confidante and advisor. Ewing-Jarvie also quickly became a major cause of friction between Roy and Rodney when the latter unearthed – through his extensive network – information which indicated that Ewing-Jarvie was likely to cause serious trouble, both to  Roy  personally and to  the ACT Party.

From the first, Rodney made it crystal clear that we could not survive factionalism. I will never forget the first caucus meeting when he told us we were in the “death zone of New Zealand politics”, and that no small party had survived intact once it had joined in government with a larger party; the Alliance Party perhaps being the best example – until now – of self destruction.

The first chance Roy and Roger got to try and remove Rodney was following Hide’s disastrous decision to use one of the very “perks” he had campaigned so publicly against  to take his then girlfriend with him on a Ministerial trip to the USA and Europe. The trip was entirely within the rules, but that was not the point. If in fact he ever really did, it took Rodney a very long time to “get” that public perception was everything, and the fact that he had complied with the rules meant little or nothing  to the public. Ironically, it is the same  lesson John Banks is slowly learning now.

Roy could barely restrain her glee at the pressure Rodney faced over “the trip”. Roger remained a smiling enigma throughout; John Boscawen and I supported Rodney without reservation – at least in public. Once Rodney had  made his mea culpa  on television, there was never any doubt in John and my minds that he deserved our continuing support.  By the time the saga died down – once the left aligned media had milked every last drop from it  – the score was clearly   Camp Hide  1, Heather Roy and Roger 0.

The next major opportunity to remove Hide was of course following  my own downfall, which was engineered to occur when Hide   Hide Huidwas out the country. By that time, I had unequivocally aligned myself with him, and at a party meeting open to the public, verbally slapped down a party member who was pushing for Hide’s replacement by Roy. A week or so later, all hell broke loose.

Ironically, I am one of the few members of “team Rodney” who is by no means sure Roy was behind the leak which was to end my career, and  to  later become a major contributor  to  Hide’s downfall. I realized from the very first time Hide approached me to stand that  “the passport scam” was likely to emerge and cause serious trouble, both for me personally, and for ACT.

Hide took the view that the wrongdoing was so long ago – I had committed the offence in 1984 – that it would be of no consequence, and if it did emerge, they would “handle it.” At a later meeting at my then office in Albany, I was asked whether I had skeletons in my closet. I am on record as replying that I did,   “ a big f….rattling one”.

Those at that meeting were John Boscawen, Roger Douglas, an ACT board member, and Heather Roy. I explained what I had done and how, and repeated the truth: that I had no reason to do it, and at the time I simply saw it as a prank. To their  great credit, other than Roy, none of the others at that meeting have ever denied that I made a full disclosure of what I had done so  long before, and its sequel in a court case three years earlier,  in 2005.

Not long after that meeting in Albany I was offered list position number five after a former MP “spat the dummy” at being offered a list place much lower than he thought he was worth.  The timebomb began ticking from that point.

ᔥ Bowalley Road

Chris Trotter appears to be worried that Labour has rebuilt itself into the Rogernomics party again:

If we want to pass through the next round of big change with our values intact, and its burdens equitably distributed, then we’re going to have to learn from past mistakes. In the language of the free-market, we’re going to have to undertake an exercise in “due diligence”.

Scoop journalist, Gordon Campbell, is showing us the way. Writing on his blog, Mr Campbell has presented us with an extraordinary passage from an article about Roger Douglas’s economic “reforms” published in The Listener of 23 February 1985:

Have the policies being tried here ever been tried elsewhere and shown to work? “I can give you the case of Finland,” Douglas replies, “which actually has done better over recent years than New Zealand.” Finland “bit the bullet” and “made the adjustment.” There was a small drop in living standards in 1979, he says, “but Finland has had increases in wages, real wages, ever since…”

Finland? Why does that country’s name ring a bell? Could it be because Finland and its former prime minister, Esko Aho, featured prominently in David Shearer’s “visionary” speech of last Thursday?

In the early 80s before the 1984 election Labour’s opposition was populated with thinkers.

Roger Douglas, David Lange, Michael Bassett, Geoffrey Palmer, Peter Tapsell, Mike Moore and Richard Prebble.

They didn’t just oppose Muldoon, they came up with some solutions to the morass the country found itself in. They showed an enormous tallent and prodigious thinking power. That powerful opposition went on to become a reforming government making dramatic lasting positive changes to the New Zealand economy crippled by Muldoon’s legacy and global economic conditions.

Even Helen Clark cut her teeth in politics at that time.

If Labour are going to challenge National seriously rather than sit back and expect to win in 2014 then they need to show the same sort of vision and ideas that those aforementioned lumnaries of Labour showed.

The problem I have is that I just don’t think there is a single one of the current Labour caucus that remotely qualifies in the same league.

There certainly isn’t a Richard Prebble and a book like “I’ve been Thinking“.

Hel me out here readers, is there anyone in the Labour caucus right now that will have such a dramatic positive effect on New Zealand like that of the 4th Labour government?

Winning the war of hearts and minds mustn’t be important to MUNZ. Clearly, they are failing to win the workplace argument, and now MUNZ and the Hobbit Hater are trying to whip up the privatisation bogeyman.

Not content with having their leader Garry Parsloe ruin their PR, MUNZ wheel in the one woman who represents threats over job destruction, union ineptitude and excessive union arrogance – the woman who became known as the “hobbit hater”, Helen Kelly.

It is ironic that the “boys” on the wharf, where they have allowed just two women to work out of 212, are now having to turn to skirt to assist them. I hope Helen Kelly is insisting that the price for her help will be 50% of the new wharf workforce will be women.

For POAL to commit the same kind of error in toxic representation, they would need to appoint a consortium led by Roger Douglas and Don Brash to go on TV and look cranky and magooish.

Fortunately for POAL, they don’t look to be committing that kind of error.

Cactus Kate has written an article for NBR on her view of the demise of ACT and where to now:

You could reach several times around the world with nonsensical column inches written over the years about the impending demise of ACT.

Many supposed political “experts” had numerous self-absorbed reasons for planting the spin.

Dr Brash went one step further than just talking about it and led ACT to a record thumping. A 1% list vote and barely scraping through in Epsom in a tactically contrived win where Don and John managed to almost grab defeat from the jaws of victory.

Her comments about what is an ACToid are fascinating in their simplicity:

ACT has ground itself down with obsessive branding labels such as libertarian, classical liberal and conservatives.

The over-indulgence has caused me confusion such that right now even I have no idea what faction I belong to.

I think she misses out the key feature of ACT supporters. To a person they have always been part of a cult of personality. Firstly it was to Roger Douglas, then to Richard Prebble and finally to Rodney Hide. Their fascination with labels like classic liberal etc shows a deep misunderstanding that the New Zealand electorate hasn’t a clue what that even means.

It is the same mistake that Labour makes when they label National as Tories. It is from the politics of elsewhere that these label come from. ACT was spawned from Labour, they even call National supporters Tories like their parent party does. The people who originally came to ACT were the right of Labour spurned by a resurgent union wing. Along the way they picked up the young who had never known compulsory unionism and the liberal economic believers. But they all still have an inherited an abiding loathing for the National party and so never comfortably could work with them.

I asked a long term ACT supporter what they would do if the party ceased to exist and they told me that they would get an interest in something else. They had no interest in joining any other party than the ACT party. That told me right there that ACT supporters didn’t really understand or grasp that politics is a long game. Their ideas are still valid but because of a tribal adherence to some amorphous “core values” they can’t and won’t engage in any other party. Cactus KAte explains the despondence:

I realised I wasn’t really quite that interested in politics. I perhaps had grown up to see just how horrible it is and politics was sitting in priority in my life by Sunday evening with watching lawn bowls.

The ironic thing is the ones who show their loyalty the loudest and proudest to the ACT party have all shown their belief in the market and liberalism by fucking off overseas and them telling everyone else what the party should be and act like.

They are remembering a party that no longer exists, the party they left behind when they went overseas failed to change with the times and the electorate voted accordingly. ACT supporters talk of core values but I doubt any of them could even tell me what they are.

Just as pinkos like David Farrar can exist inside the National party then so too can classic liberals and libertarians. Better in a tent than outside wondering where to pitch their pup tent.