What NZ can learn from US midterms
New Zealand politics can be extremely New Zealand at times. We pull proposed legislation out of a literal biscuit tin, and have a whole ministerial portfolio for racing. But no country is an island, and our political culture is far from isolated, taking obvious cues from the United Kingdom, Germany and the United States.
Of those influential countries, our system is probably the least like America’s. But we still see our politicians take on American tactics, often a year or so later than American politicians pick them up themselves.
Take, for example, the spreading of a false or misleading news article from a hyper-partisan emotive news outlet to score political points: Donald Trump did it in 2016, National MP Judith Collins did it this year.
Politicians across the spectrum have started using the term ‘‘fake news’’ to talk about stories they disagree with. And Jami-Lee Ross himself suggested National got the idea of accusing him of harassment by watching the Brett Kavanaugh hearings.
I’ve spent the last two weeks in the United States following the midterm election campaign, which ended on Wednesday with exactly the results expected two months ago: a Democratic takeover of the House and a revitalised Republican majority in the Senate. While the result was expected, the campaign to get there had plenty of surprises.
Here are three big lessons Kiwi politicians – and plain old Kiwis! – can learn from the way the world’s largest economy just did democracy.
ONE: Nothing is more powerful than a single simple national message.
The Democrats won at least four million more votes than the Republicans did in the House, and they did that with one consistent message across the hundreds and hundreds of local campaigns: we will protect your healthcare and the Republicans won’t.
This simple message was amplified particularly strongly through a huge fundraising gap the Democrats opened up, meaning they had way more ads on TV saying this than Republicans could properly respond to. There were spins on this basic theme – some want to move the country to a single-payer system like ours, others just want to strengthen and retain the protections afforded by Obamacare – but the big emotional logic was all the same.
This also proves that campaigning very much against what the other guys plan to do can work just as well as campaigning for something. Voters love to say they want politicians to speak inspiringly about changing the world, but often they really just want the status quo, particularly with regards to services they now expect from the government. That’s why you can never touch national superannuation.
TWO: You need good candidates in every position.
Yes, in this day and age all politics is nationalised and the person at the top of the ticket matters the most. But the real effort the Democrats put into getting highquality candidates from nonpolitical backgrounds to run in competitive seats (and some noncompetitive ones) all over the country really showed. After years of being criticised for not having a deep ‘‘bench’’ like the Republicans do, the Democrats are starting to develop a better one.
Kiwi parties would do well to make sure their party lists aren’t dominated by party hacks whose turn has come, but by talented and charismatic people whom voters will like more for who they are than the party they represent. You also need to run them everywhere – that means Labour needs a strong candidate in unwinnable CluthaSouthland and National the same in Manukau East.
Of course, parties already work very hard on candidate selection in New Zealand, and MMP makes running a strong race everywhere imperative. But it’s worth repeating, especially as Labour starts to get together its list for what it hopes will be another term of government.
THREE: Be thankful our system is so much better.
This will sound cavalier and perhaps overly patriotic. But it’s true. Americans aren’t naturally more divided or partisan than we are, and yet their system itself has entrenched and encouraged deep divisions in recent years. And unlike our evolving democracy, they can’t fix the issues with their system easily because it has been solidified in a constitution.
Let me explain. Remember how I said millions more people voted for the Democrats than the Republicans this week?
That win resulted in a House majority, mostly from pickups of suburban seats, but not a majority in the Senate – in fact, the Republicans will increase their power there. A lot of that has to do with a generally unfavourable map for the Democrats this year, but an even bigger factor is the fact that every state in the US gets the very same amount of representation in the Senate. Tiny rural states like Wyoming, with a population a bit bigger than Wellington, get two senators out of 100. California, a state of almost 40 million, also gets two.
This isn’t a mistake. The famous ‘‘Missouri compromise’’ during the nation’s foundation explicitly gave small rural states more power in the Senate to check the heady urban population centres which might dominate the House.
But as the general population becomes more and more urban, this system has made things more and more skewed. Right now the 25 smallest states in the nation have roughly the population of California, but they get 50 senators to California’s two. And those smaller states are more and more in Republican hands, while the huge urban ones are more and more in Democratic hands.
This system isn’t just antiDemocratic and becoming more so, it also actively encourages that rural/urban divide, as a wide demographic sorting has made rural areas more Republican and urban areas more Democratic. Why bother trying to appeal to urban voters with policies that are good for everyone if you’re a senator in a state that will vote for any Republican or any Democrat on the ticket?
New Zealand avoids any of these troubles with its MMP system, where districts are proportional and that national party vote matters more anyway. As a result of this, our urban/rural divide is nowhere near as stark.
National, despite its rural roots, still wins hundreds of thousands of votes in Auckland, and has a lot of policies to offer people there. Labour, despite its clear roots in the urban working class, still competes seriously in a handful of more provincial seats, and needs to care about keeping its party vote up in every seat in the country.
This keeps our politicians much more connected to the actual mood of the country, rather than any hyper-partisan slice of voters. It also means we have governments that the majority of the country actually voted for. That’s something to be celebrated. UP
Jacinda Ardern: She’s been prime minister for a year, but there was still one box Ardern hadn’t ticked – addressing a Labour Party conference as leader. She finally got to stand in front of the party faithful in Dunedin last weekend and it was something its younger members haven’t experienced before – a happy, joyous affair. Finance Minister Grant Robertson: The numbers are all going his way with the jobless at a 10-year low, the surplus at $5.5b and growth full steam ahead. Take that, business confidence. National MP Michael Woodhouse: His dogged pursuit of Immigration Minister Iain Lees-Galloway over the Karel Sroubek scandal has punctured the Government’s post-poll cheer.
DOWN Lees-Galloway: His admission that he didn’t read the full file and spent less than an hour considering the residency case for convicted criminal Sroubek beggars belief.
NZ First leader Winston Peters: Spin it how you will, accepting the proxy vote offered by expelled National MP Jami-Lee Ross surely cuts across the spirit of NZ First’s bottom line on the waka-jumping law.
Simon Bridges: The National leader keeps trying to move on from the Jami-Lee Ross affair but the drip-feed of leaked audio recordings stops this.
The curious case of the consultant and NZ First: Merely mention the names Cameron Slater and Simon Lusk and conspiracy theories abound, so the rumours have been running wild since Lusk was seen at a $300-a-head Russell McVeagh-hosted fundraiser for NZ First. Is he working for the party? Lusk won’t comment (he says he never discusses clients) and NZ First leader Winston Peters categorically denies it, as does his MP Shane Jones. Jones went even further when asked if he had any link to Slater, aka Right-wing blogger Whaleoil, saying, ‘‘I very rarely clean my sewage tank and that’s what Whaleoil is.’’