A breed apart? MPs now birds of a different feather
They are better educated and paid. They are raised in the cities and political machinery. Do politicians still represent us? Rob Mitchell reports.
Thank God for Winston. Damien O’Connor is a bit of an outlier. The MP for West Coast-Tasman and minister of all things rural is casting his eye over Cabinet colleagues.
Pretty much to a man – and woman – they are young, urbane, university-educated with strong government backgrounds. For some it’s all they’ve known.
Thank God for Winston, he says. ‘‘I hate to admit that but I look around the Cabinet occasionally and realise that I’m one of the senior members . . . and I keep pretending I’m young when I look at him.’’
A lot of the voting public would hate to admit it, but they too are outliers. They too have more in common with the curmudgeonly NZ First leader Peters and his coalition colleague O’Connor than many others in Cabinet.
And that has some political commentators and experts worried. About a growing threat to democracy, a building distrust of politicians, and a widening divide between our representatives and those they are meant to represent.
Peters and O’Connor have both been politicians for a long time, the former on and off since 1978. But there was life and experience before the Beehive.
It wasn’t quite tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor but Peters did try his hand at teaching and the law; he also travelled overseas and worked as a blast furnace worker and tunneller.
Westport-born O’Connor hails from the birthplace of the Labour Party but his background sets him apart from the modern version and its machinery: he didn’t last long at university, deciding instead on fencing, sharemilking and then setting up his own whitewater rafting business. His was not a career developed as a series of building blocks to enter the House, but merely one possible consequence of a life that could have gone in many different directions.
Research suggests a more orderly, deliberate progression for the modern, career politician. One that potentially robs them of the broad experience and associated empathy to back difficult decisions.
BlacklandPR has been tracking the backgrounds of the country’s politicians for the past eight years. Director Mark Blackham and political analyst Geoffrey Miller studied bios, examined CVs and trawled through hundreds of statements, media stories, Hansard documents, speeches and social media postings to compile a picture of the modern parliament and the people working within it.
Victoria University political lecturer Bryce Edwards believes it is a robust, formidable piece of research.
Blackham says the work helped his firm ‘‘understand what motivates MPs; we wanted to understand their decisionmaking, what they’re interested in’’.
What the pair found was that many politicians have little experience outside the bubble of the Beehive and gravity of government work.
Their research revealed that 44 per cent of newcomers in last year’s general election had ‘‘no definable career’’ before Parliament, but one in five had some work experience tied to government. That is more obvious within the Labour Party, where a quarter of MPs count government work as a primary career — up on 17 per cent in 2010.
‘‘Most of the jobs for MPs tended to be pen-pushing, they were office-bound,’’ says Blackham. ‘‘Their work history was largely political, so it was either executive assistants for parliamentarians, researchers, party jobs of some sort, and then people working in government agencies and departments . . . involved in politics.’’
Few politicians in any of the parties had any experience of the agricultural sector, despite its often-stated importance to the country’s economy.
The lack of outside experience and a narrow educational background is most pronounced in the new Cabinet, where close to 90 per cent of ministers are university-educated and most have strong policy and government backgrounds, and little else.
That means too many politicians are ‘‘over-educated and under-employed’’, says Blackham. ‘‘Those people are time-serving because they’ve gone from university politics into general party politics.’’
He believes that has played a part in severing links with the voters and diminishing the politicians’ ability to make sound decisions.
‘‘I’d argue that direct experience of the lives, difficulties and expectations and priorities of ordinary people is something that is hard to forget and will better enable you to understand the impact of the decision you are making,’’ he says.
‘‘If your experience is rarified or significantly different to the majority of people who voted for you then your decisions are going to be different to what they might expect, and in a representative democracy I think that’s a bad thing.’’
Edwards agrees. He believes MMP and a greater focus on diversity have made Parliament more representative ‘‘of gender and ethnicity . . . browner and more female, and younger’’. ‘‘But economically it’s become much more narrow, in terms of social backgrounds; you might call it class background or socioeconomic background, or occupational background.’’
Some of that reflects changes in society – there are fewer
farmers, urban centres have grown at the expense of the regions, and more of us are opting for higher education.
But the ‘‘decline in the House is much steeper than society’s decline. So it’s now there are
Damien O’Connor
fewer people from working class backgrounds, from manual work backgrounds . . . it’s unusual to have someone from a lowincome background’’.
And to understand their issues when you are paid at least
$160,000, plus perks. ‘‘That means they are quarantined from the everyday lives of everyone else,’’ says Edwards. ‘‘They are isolated from the direct concerns of prices at the petrol pumps or cost of groceries because it simply doesn’t affect them.
‘‘Democracy is the poorer. Absolutely it’s meaning that our representatives are unrepresentative. It’s meaning that politicians don’t govern in the interests of the bulk of the population.’’
He believes the painful economic reforms of the 80s and
90s were early examples of policies driven by politicians out of touch with the people.
‘‘The politicians were quarantined from that pain and voted for it, and have continued, by and large, to keep . . . that inequality in place.’’
An inequality that has led to distrust.
Edwards is thumbing through a 1966 survey on MPs. ‘‘It shows that 36 per cent of respondents thought MPs were doing a satisfactory job, 46 per cent thought good or very good job, and 8 per cent thought they were doing a poor job,’’ he says. ‘‘I think that’s quite remarkable; if that survey was done today I think you’d find a lot more than
8 per cent of the public would judge MPs’ quality as being poor.’’
He’s right. In 1985, as politicians’ incomes outstripped those of their peers and they retreated further behind the political machine, academics Paul Perry and Alan Webster noted that just 8.6 per cent of New Zealanders had ‘‘a great deal’’ of confidence in the Government. By 1998 that figure had fallen to 2.5 per cent. The number of people who were ‘‘not at all’’ confident in the good intentions of their government doubled from 11.1 per cent to 21.8 per cent.
More up-to-date research is difficult to find, but Edwards doubts that things would have improved.
He and Blackham are also doubtful that the rise of a bettereducated political elite has led to better decision-making. Or better politicians.
Quite the opposite, in fact. ‘‘It’s one of the ironies that these people seem to be less capable politicians,’’ says Blackham, ‘‘and the professionalism of being a politician, they’re not trained for that, they seem to be as bad or worse at the job . . . I see less evidence of capability.’’ He highlights the demise of Clare Curran – ‘‘multiple instances of monumentally simple and stupid screw-ups’’ — as an example.
‘‘Regardless of what you think of the politics of Jim Bolger,’’ says Edwards, ‘‘he was an extraordinarily talented prime minister, and he left school at an early age and had no tertiary education.’’
Blackham would add Mike Moore to that list. He worked with the Labour prime minister in 1990. ‘‘He was a self-made guy, smart, savvy with a common touch. He understood what it was like to struggle, remembered what it was like, and that was always his touchstone.
‘‘But it’s true that at the same time there were a lot of others in the Labour Government, that were part of the emergence of the new Labour, who were unieducated, lecturers. People making decisions were uni lecturers, versus a guy who had worked on the docks, with bus drivers.’’
Damien O’Connor acknowledges that he and Peters possibly represent the end of an era, that the door to the House is now even harder to open for those without a university qualification and a green card from the party machine.
‘‘The realities of MMP have delivered more power to party organisations, and the appointment of virtually half the Parliament,’’ he says. ‘‘There’s an element of truth that the old style accountability through the ballot box is less than it was for individual MPs.’’
But he believes Parliament is more diverse now than it was in the past. ‘‘MMP has brought new inputs into Parliament and I think made it far better for that, even though, for individuals it’s more frustrating at times, because you have to deal with a wider range of perspectives.’’
That supports decisionmaking as well.
‘‘In Cabinet you very rarely make a decision in isolation,’’ he says, ‘‘your ability to make the right decision is based on your judgment, surrounded by experts.’’
He believes experience is just one part of the puzzle for picking politicians; motivation is another key piece. ‘‘The question as to why a politician is in Parliament is the one that should be asked by every single constituent, not what they’ve done or how they’ve done it. If they are there for the right reason then they should do their best to make the right judgments.’’
The realities of MMP have delivered more power to party organisations.