Fitting the Bill
Looking for the X-factor
It was the political bromance of the decade, the rock of National’s extraordinary success: John Key and Bill English. The dour Southland farmer and the Auckland rich-lister. The butt of each other’s jokes, English the perfect foil to Key and vice versa.
English once said about him and Key: ‘‘I’m a stayer, he’s a sprinter. I grind away. John just bounces from one cloud to another.’’
Prescient words. Key has made the big bounce to the next cloud. Before Key’s bombshell retirement on Monday there had been speculation English might be ready to move on after 26 years in politics. When Key’s office called an urgent press conference, some even wondered if English’s departure might be the reason.
But here he is, English the stayer, grinding away back at the Beehive, entrusted with earning National a fourth term.
Winning the next election was a huge hill to climb even with Key at the helm. With Key gone, it’s still do-able, but hardly a given.
Key had the X-factor. Can a safe pair of hands translate as X-factor? English is stolidly dependable, a details man. Key operates on gut instinct, backing himself to make the right call.
English’s lack of ego can be summed up by his record over the last decade.
Key was the front-of-house salesman, big picture guy and raconteur. English revelled in staying in Key’s shadow while running the engine room. He’s revolutionised the public service, kept a tight hand on the purse-strings, driven the policy machine and took up-and-comers like Paula Bennett – and before her Simon Power – under his wing.
Key also happened to be the most popular National prime minister in recent history. English was the party’s least popular leader, carrying it to its worst ever defeat in 2002.
The 2002 campaign was an unfolding horror show, the caucus riven by disunity and division.
English was forced into increasingly desperate stunts to try to raise his profile. Caucus meetings were shambolic. And new policies were coming off the fax at all hours.
But English is older and wiser. He is less inclined to sweat the detail; he’s willing to take policy risks and shrug off failure if ideas don’t pan out. And he goes into the job from a position of strength rather than weakness.
Fifteen years ago, National was at a low ebb after nine years in power, torn apart by ideology, and Helen Clark was at the zenith of her popularity.
Now things are very different. English’s stocks are high – he’s ranked as one of the most successful finance ministers in the OECD. He is lauded and respected internationally and reassuringly predictable at home.
Without English, New Zealand may have fallen out of love with Key long before now. Through even the darkest days – and there have been many – it was English who kept the faith with voters about returning the books to surplus and tackling the debt monster. If Key made English look good, then the opposite is also true.
SO WHAT NOW?
In those first shell-shocked hours after Key announced his resignation, the order of things seemed like a given. English steps in as leader, New Zealand’s most famous Westie, Paula Bennett, steps up as deputy and the finance portfolio shuffles to Economic Development Minister Steven Joyce. Situation normal? Not so much.
It took a day for National’s backbench to wake up to the realisation that just because that was how the top bench had scripted it, there was nothing in National’s rules that required them to meekly fall into line.
In the first 24 hours they were the proverbial stunned mullets; Key was the great security blanket, the bulwark against an election loss, the notion that he would be defeated by Labour and the Greens almost laughable. Suddenly everything they thought they knew about the next election was wrong.
The flexing of muscles on National’s back bench, once the shock had worn off, suggests it won’t all be plain sailing for the new leader.
Relative unknown Jonathan Coleman was the stalking horse for a back-bench agenda for change.
His emergence as a credible candidate forced English to take stock of back-bench demands for regeneration and renewal.
There will be an expectation of younger faces being promoted, with some of the old guard either moved down or out of Cabinet altogether. But it’s a tightrope.
Too much change risks undercutting National’s most potent message heading into the 2017 election; that it’s the more credible economic manager – stable, predictable and a safe pair of hands. Not enough change risks National looking like a spent force. Key ran his government like a boardroom. Decisions were held within the tight circle of Key’s kitchen cabinet – English, Joyce, Bennett, Gerry Brownlee, and Murray McCully.
But there had been early signs of the back bench pushing back; workplace health and safety laws had to be rewritten to stave off a threatened back-bench revolt, there have been rumbles over Resource Management Act sweeteners for the Maori Party.
Key’s power was so absolute he could afford to wave those off as minor setbacks. English can’t. Any sign of disunity will be amplified and magnified in his early period as leader. He will have to be more consultative and that carries with it its own risks. A risk-averse caucus – and those worried about a rampant NZ First seizing provincial votes are feeling very risk averse – could translate to paralysis and acrimony, especially if the polls start to turn.
English will also have to weigh how far to go in stamping his own mark on the Government. The extent to which the residual goodwill from the Key years will carry him is a big unknown.
Ideologically, English is drier than Key. But English got his political baptism in the Ruth Richardson years. Richardson’s ‘‘Mother of all Budgets’’ in the early 1990s seared a flinty face on the party. It was a miserable time for the class of 1990.
So English was Key’s more than willing ally in resisting the Richardson, Don Brash-think that the shocks of the global financial crisis were good cover for slash and burn policies.
He delivered the budgets that enabled Key to make good on his promise to support the most vulnerable and maintain benefits rather than cut them, even while the books were drowning in a sea of red.
But where the Key-led government has been famously flexible on ideology, an English-led government will likely put more stakes in the ground.
English believes, for instance, that the government shouldn’t be running services or facilities where there are private options available.
Social housing is one area where he has tried to put that into practice.
Despite setbacks, English has doggedly stuck to the programme, where the more agile Key might have detuned it or even flagged it away.
That could be a risk for English’s leadership. While much of the heat has gone out of the privatisation debate, the big unknown is the extent to which that was down to Key’s stocks with the New Zealand public.
As voters, we might just be over the old ideological battle lines. Or not. Maybe Key was the salesman who could sell icecreams to Eskimos.
THE STRAINS ARE SHOWING
But the gap left by Key is not English’s only disadvantage; the housing crisis, which has punished first-home buyers the hardest, happened under his and Key’s watch. There are signs of strain in the health system. Law and order is becoming an issue; there are too many stories about crimes being ignored and police failing to turn up. Crowded garages, children without shoes, and food bank queues are feeding stories of poverty and deprivation.
English can’t blame all the problems on his predecessor; he owns them as much as Key.
But voters were always prepared to give Key huge leeway – partly because of their extraordinary rapport but also due to the circumstances in which his Government took office. Some of that goodwill may evaporate with Key’s departure, but English has been salting away rainy day options.
It’s probably no coincidence that MPs lined up behind English’s leadership on the same day he unveiled surpluses rising from $3 billion to $8 billion over the next five years.
That’s something English can take ownership of. And it also sets the tone for his leadership. He will be able to scratch those itches in law and order and other areas, while delivering to the party core on tax cuts, even if that’s something he de-emphasised when the books were opened.
His bigger challenge may be turning his predictability into a strength. If National was looking for a silver lining in Key’s departure – and there aren’t many – it is that he had become increasingly polarising among voters. English may be less so.
But they may not calm shattered nerves if the next polls show Key took with him their best chance of winning.