Testing times for Ardern’s popularity
Jacinda Ardern’s rise was so sudden it’s easy to wonder if her fall could happen just as fast. Especially after yet another week from hell for the PM.
But the trumpets of doom sounding for a Labour apocalypse are premature.
All governments have bad weeks, but they don’t all leave lasting scars.
One of Ardern’s most famous predecessors, Helen Clark, had to contend with a business backlash against a Labour government, and a winter of discontent.
Clark was also forced to sack her Maori affairs minister Dover Samuels after a police investigation into sex allegations. Another minister was engulfed in a bullying scandal and yet another police investigation.
One of her high-profile ministers, John Tamihere, was secretly recorded talking about women’s ‘‘front bums’’. Her Pacific affairs minister Taito Philip Field was accused of corruption in the so-called ‘‘Thai tiler’’ affair. And that’s just the highlights reel.
Yet Clark reigned supreme for nine long years.
It was probably only the last scandal – Field’s corruption – that helped do her government in. And that was because Clark threw away her usual uncompromising play book for taking swift and decisive action.
Former National prime minister John Key was back at Parliament this week briefly for Steven Joyce’s valedictory, which reminded us that it was hardly plain sailing for his government either.
Key sacked a minister early on for still-murky reasons. Another minister was forced to resign for rorting her taxpayer funded travel perk. His government was engulfed by a string of other controversies over the years – teapot tapes, anyone?
There was even a scandal with overtones of the Clare Curran, Carol Hirschfeld debacle playing out around RNZ, after allegations that Key hired an old mate to run the GCSB.
But Clark and Key both earned a reputation for being ‘‘teflon’’ leaders for a reason. While the commentary and political beltway whipped itself into a frenzy over those things, most of it was water off a duck’s back as far as voters were concerned.
Key was so ‘‘teflon’’, in fact, that we all got egg on our face at various times for assuming the latest controversy would follow the usual rules and damage his government.
But the relationship between voters and governments is much more complex than that. National’s poll ratings barely budged through the eight years Key led the country.
Key’s return to Parliament this week showed why he stayed on top for so long. He was typically loose as a goose in his speech farewelling Joyce and not bothered by who was in the audience, which included a fair number of the press gallery.
Key rarely sweated the small stuff as leader, even when the Opposition and the media had worked themselves into a lather. That was where he and Clark were vastly different. Clark was a legendary micro-manager.
It was that obvious trait of Key never taking himself too seriously that voters responded to. But as with Clark, they had huge respect for his competence.
Key also had a nose for which issues would play with the public and which would more likely pass over their heads as they got on with their own busy lives.
But like Clark, Key had a ruthless streak as wide as the river Nile. Neither was sentimental when decisive action was required.
Ardern is not Clark. And she is not Key. Even her opponents would agree she is almost painfully nice, compassionate, caring, empathetic and incredibly earnest.
Those are the qualities voters responded to against the backdrop of concern about children sleeping in cars, inequality, a generation left behind by rising house prices and a sense of National being a less caring government.
They are not qualities that make for an easy fit with the sort of ruthlessness that was central to Clark and Key’s success. But that is not necessarily fatal.
STREAK OF MONGREL
Ardern, like Key, has rewritten the political rule book, if there is even such a thing any more. She leads at a time when politics is in a state of flux worldwide, when news cycles flash past ever faster, and when fewer and fewer people get their news from traditional media.
But it probably wouldn’t hurt if Ardern’s rapid learning curve included acquiring a streak of mongrel.
It’s debatable whether Ardern could have done more over the debacle that forced the resignation of Radio NZ head of news Carol Hirschfeld over a coffee meeting with the Broadcasting Minister, Clare Curran.
While the story is grabbing most of this week’s headlines, it will disappear as quickly as it surfaced unless – as the gossip doing the rounds in Wellington suggests – new information emerges from next week’s select committee hearing with the RNZ board chair and chief executive.
It’s no secret that there are swirling suspicions at RNZ that Hirschfeld was being informally auditioned for promotion as Curran ran into headwinds at RNZ over her lofty ambitions to remake it as a linear public service TV channel.
Ardern has put Curran on the mat and got an assurance that no such matters were discussed. Any deviation from those assurances would be enough for Ardern to sack her, which probably wouldn’t do her leadership any harm.
Either way, the Curran problem will be tidied away sooner rather than later.
It probably wouldn’t hurt if Ardern’s rapid learning curve included acquiring a streak of mongrel.
NZ FIRST OUT OF LINE
Ardern’s bigger headache is NZ First and its cavalier treatment of its Labour ally.
Helen Clark blasted Labour across the bows this week for letting Ardern down over the youth camp scandal. She could just as easily have taken aim at NZ First leader Winston Peters and his cohorts.
After Shane Jones ran amok over Air New Zealand last week, Ardern had to spend this week
putting out fires over NZ First bully-boy tactics and Peters, the Foreign Minister, running his own foreign policy line on Russia.
Ardern needs to find her inner mongrel and remind Peters that she is the de facto foreign minister in this Government and his job is to support her on foreign policy, not the other way round.
And after that, Ardern should summon her kitchen cabinet and thrash out a plan for seizing back the momentum and putting her Government back on track.
There should be a rolling maul of measures between now and the May Budget.
That’s how Clark and Key would have done it.