Politics
National is picking its battles, neutering a foe in the process.
Jane Clifton
Oppositional defiant disorder is a childhood syndrome of deliberately vindictive and antisocial behaviour that psychiatrists consider curable by cognitive behavioural therapy. When adult politicians succumb to it, however, the only treatment is a series of really bad opinion polls or, in extreme cases, a leadership coup.
It’s fitting that Opposition leader Simon Bridges, who seems a severe ODD sufferer, has offered to run down Dominion Rd in his under-dungers if Auckland’s light-rail build starts on time because, in a political sense, it’s the sort of thing he now does every day. Beneficiary bashing, flouting the national mood towards tighter gun control, catastrophising our globally low unemployment figures, saying rude things about trade deals he would secretly sell his granny to secure and insinuating the Prime Minister has baby brain – there isn’t a naughty step that can contain him.
So it’s hard to know whether to be relieved or disappointed when the realisation dawns that Bridges is utterly faking it.
A true ODD sufferer would have spat out his veges and overturned his toy box at the second reading of the Zero Carbon Bill this week. Bridges instructed his troops to make a reasoned, co-operative critique of the climate-change legislation, and provisionally vowed to support it.
Adult ODD simply doesn’t go into remission like this. It has even been known to continue once the patient has left politics. Former finance minister Steven Joyce was in the paper defending state subsidy of the Tiwai Point aluminium smelter the other day. He’s got ODD for life.
The other clue that Bridges may be simply acting up for effect is a fairly conclusive one: he told people he wuz gonna. He has boasted of his boastfulness. He would say, he said, whatever it took to dominate the agenda.
This isn’t antisocial behaviour, but election strategy. He has never denied a report of a leaked staff list that showed he now has twice the number of staff working on social media as he has in policy and research combined. These are not press secretaries, but staffers whose full-time job is churning eyepopping National messages through websites.
It must have been a blow that Twitter’s new policy is to refuse election campaign ads, but on Facebook and the other big platforms, it’s still anything goes.
National has invested hugely – or should that be bigly? – in research on how to reach and influence people via various social-media funnels, having studied the darkarts lessons from abroad, not least Donald Trump’s success in shoring up his presidency with pithy – albeit often dumb – tweets.
There’s also the blinder played by Brexit strategist Dominic Cummings in feeding out catchy but untrue factoids about the European Union in the run-up to Britain’s referendum on membership of the trade bloc. Australia’s Scott Morrison made a shrewd series of pitches exclusively to conservative Queenslanders, which helped him hang on to his job against the tide of expectations.
Bridges has not denied having twice the staff working on social media as in policy and research combined.
BEACON OF BALDERDASH
Politicians no longer have to play by print or broadcast media’s rules if they can establish a strong enough presence on enough people’s phones and tablets. With the right research, they can target messages to select, susceptible audiences. In cyberspace, there’s no annoying interviewer to “yes, but” your every exaggeration or lie – or as Bridges puts it, you won’t “get Susied”. There’s no tedious presentation of your rivals’ arguments, either, and no inconvenient experts pointing out the downside effects of your policies. You can target people over the media’s heads and make them believe things that aren’t true. And, most winningly, you can make them want to believe them.
Brexit is the shining beacon. A
referendum held today would almost certainly reconfirm that decision because, despite the exhaustive subsequent fact-correction and the piles of evidence of how damaging and even impoverishing the EU exit could be, a majority of Britons remain heavily invested in the belief that shedding the Eurocratic mantle will bring justice and salvation.
National’s ODD strategy is twofold: get king-hit messages out about the Government’s failures (admittedly, not hard, as the Government does a lot of this work itself), and kill off New Zealand First’s chances of retaining enough of its traditional provincial, conservative and blue-collar vote to survive and get Labour-Greens across the line again.
The latter is incidentally why NZ First’s Shane Jones is also faking ODD – insulting immigrants, posing with an automatic rifle and generally using the Cabinet Manual as Kleenex.
This drag race to the bottom of politics is, in a roundabout way, why the Zero Carbon truce, despite its wobbliness, may endure. Both National and NZ First have been on hair trigger over whether to fight aspects of it, which they reckon will be too tough on farmers and provincial communities. But in a rerun of the final scene of
Zulu, in which the warriors laying siege to Rorke’s Drift turn and walk away, National has decided that to be seen to impede the country’s flagship climate measures would be an election risk. It doesn’t want taunts of “climate change denier” and “Okay, boomer” drowning out its ODD messages on the campaign trail.
A GRAND COALITION?
National’s surrender means there’s little point in NZ First opposing aspects of the bill, as it has been itching to do, because it hasn’t got the numbers to so much as move an apostrophe. The risk of giving NZ
First deal-breaker status over Zero Carbon, and thus hero status with the rural sector, is another disincentive for National’s opposing the bill.
National will try to persuade the Government to leave the setting of emissions targets to the independent Climate Change Commission and to restrict forestry displacement of food-producing land, but that’s about it.
Crikey, think what this means. After decades of failed attempts at a grand coalition on the things that really matter – superannuation, education, penal reform – we’ve finally found the elusive issue that politicians can actually resist turning into a political football.
Posterity may record this as Bridges’ finest hour, little though he may enjoy it. He can always close his eyes and think of light rail until the ordeal passes.
At the risk of encouraging more base ODD politics, Jones might consider leading a chorus of Kumbaya in Bridges’ honour when the legislation passes.
We’ve finally found the elusive issue that politicians can resist turning into a political football.