What are our pollies worth?
We vote for politicians, and pay their salaries, but we don’t seem to trust them.
The first thing you notice when you visit Parliament is just how beautiful the building is. It’s impossible not to feel a certain reverence for the place. It’s the people’s house, it belongs to the people.
We decided to go and look at Parliament because whenever you’re looking at how to solve the nation’s problems, it always comes back to Parliament.
Politicians are despised but when you spend some time with them, you quickly realise that almost all of them are there because they want to make a difference and do something positive. It’s just that ambition and ego sometimes get in the way.
Our Parliament is based on a clash of ideas and we’ve been led to believe that’s a good way to solve problems, but that’s the worst way to solve problems. It’s not the best idea that emerges, it’s the person with the loudest voice who wins.
In a perfect world we’d be able to sit down as humans and talk through ideas. We’d just have a bunch of people who aren’t members of any party. They’d be genuinely open to any solution rather than driven by ideological views.
Ideally Parliament would be comprised of people who are there with a particular goal they are trying to achieve.
The politician who is elected on the basis of a cause will behave very differently to the politician who is there for a career.
The problem now is we have this political class, career politicians whose primary focus is on getting re-elected, and because of that they can stay in power for decades.
It’s the adversarial nature of the system and the focus on the trivial that’s destructive, but it is still in my humble opinion a very flawed system in terms of actually fixing problems. It’s the best we’ve got, but it’s flawed.
We spent some time with Paula Bennett, and regardless of what you think of her as a person or her politics, she works incredibly hard. She oversees a huge budget. And that’s the thing, they do an important job so we want smart people in there.
The bulk of Parliament’s work is in select committees. In the select committee that we sat in on, it was the politicians who were being sensible, and it was the public servants who were trying to argue for a position that may have been legally correct, but was not in the actual interests of everyday New Zealanders. It was the first time I’d seen MPs as the sensible ones protecting all of us, and that was refreshing.
One of the interesting things we did was to follow the procedure of how questions are asked in the House. The whole process builds in intensity over the day and I can understand how they all get caught up in the drama of it all. The problem is that while they all think it’s a really big deal to ask a question in the House, but none of the rest of us care.
In fact, most of us are appalled by their behaviour in the Chamber. It was fascinating watching the reaction of school kids who’d come to see democracy in action. Their faces alternated between amusement and disbelief that our nation’s leaders could be acting like this.
Ultimately though, our knowledge if what happens in Parliament comes from the media. And a lot of what we see is the antics in the debating chamber displayed as ‘‘gotcha’’ journalism.
The select committee hearings,
Our Parliament is based on a clash of ideas and we’ve been led to believe that’s a good way to solve problems.
where politicians work together, are not as entertaining as the silliness in the House, so it doesn’t get covered. As a result, we think they’re all acting like kids all the time, when actually they behave like kids for only a very small percentage of the time.
At the end of my time in Parliament the thing I was most concerned about was the influence of lobbyists. I think any time a lobbyist goes to see a politician, given this is a person who’s being paid to influence politicians and policy, we should know who’s there, who they’re representing, and what was discussed. That goes for all lobbyists, whether it be a lobbyist for big alcohol or for environmental groups.
When the 2015 Rugby World Cup was on, they extended under urgency the hours that alcohol could be sold. I was appalled by that. Of all the issues that we’re facing as a nation, this is the one they can pass under urgency? When I spoke to a number of politicians from a range of parties, they said ‘I didn’t really want to do it, and my party didn’t really want to do it but we didn’t want to be the party that stopped the party’.
We could easily blame politicians and say we want them to have more courage, but then if someone had stood up and opposed extending liquor laws they would have been slammed.
After this episode airs, I’ll undoubtedly get emails about why I didn’t slam them on issues like inequality, or housing or any of the other weighty problems we face as a nation. But that wasn’t the point of going. I wanted to know more about how Parliament works, not circle round the usual policy debates. So now I know that if you want to have some influence, find your local MP and feed them a question they might get to ask in the House. Because if it gets asked in the House, you might just get some media attention on your issue. There are some principled, genuinely compassionate people in there who really want to make a difference. And then I think there are people who are the complete opposite.
They are, after all, just people like all of us. Like all organisations they have great people, and some not so great. For us, though, as voters, I’m hoping we can learn to demand more than coverage of the trivial, or the endless inane controversies, and instead expect a higher quality of debate. We should also, just by the by, lift our own game.