Return of the great distorter

Winston Peters’ reappearance in public last weekend was a reminder of the damage he has done to our democracy. When he put the Labour Party into office after the 2017 election, he did not just disappoint the winning party and its voters, he distorted the election’s reflection of public opinion.

General elections are our largest and best measure of the state of public opinion at the time. If an election changes the government, it is commonly taken to mean a critical mass of the population has become more liberal or conservative, depending on whether Labour or National has been elected.

Supporters of the winning party assert their views with new confidence, thinking most people now agree with them. People who do not share those views become less confident to say so, more likely to keep their concerns quiet for the time being.

Ever since Peters put Labour in power its supporters have believed they won, despite the fact National had received 44.4 per cent of the vote to Labour’s 36.9 per cent. Even when Labour and Green voters were added together they did not outnumber National’s supporters that year.

It had taken three parties to displace National in power and that election result could not represent a new consensus unless all three parties were unambiguously of a liberal bent on social issues. NZ First was not, and never has been, in the camp.

Last year Labour was re-elected with a majority in its own right, the first time any party has won an absolute majority since 1951. It attracted a swag of National votes thanks entirely to Jacinda Ardern’s appeal in a pandemic. But the result has reinforced the confidence of progressive folk that New Zealand has radically changed. They think it might even be Aotearoa.

They are mistaken. You don’t have to be very clever to know there is a subterranean rumbling in the land about a suspected agenda of Ma¯ori empowerment. You need only move beyond the bubbles of media, academia and public relations to hear it.

Peters hears it. He seized on it in the speech to his party’s conference last weekend. The speech was ambiguous on his future political intentions but it is quite possible he could return on a backlash against the trends created by the false confidence of liberals encouraged by his decision four years ago.

The Government must hear the rumble too and probably wishes some of its soulmates in public broadcasting were not quite so assiduous. TVNZ appears to have decided to use Ma¯ori names for the main cities at every second reference. I hear grumbles about that and understand why it grates.

The cities were colonial settlements. Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch, Hamilton and Dunedin are fine names, chosen by their founders. Many places of Ma¯ori heritage have fine Ma¯ori names. I don’t think te reo Ma¯ori needs to be used for creations of our colonial heritage.

But what rankles even more is the fact these decisions are made for us without reference to us. When the Climate Change Commission’s report calls the country Aotearoa — and only Aotearoa — at every reference, you sense an agenda at work.

It would be a pity if these excesses carried Peters back to Parliament because the damage he did in 2017 went further. New Zealand has been blessed with very stable government on the whole, because voters normally give plenty of notice when most of them want a change of government. Polls turn against the incumbent a good year or two before the next election, plenty of time for the alternative party to drop or dilute positions it has taken for opposition purposes.

That didn’t happen in 2017. Polls were giving National near certainty of a fourth term until Labour changed its leader seven weeks from the election. Consequently, it came to power with commitments it would probably have ditched had it known what Peters would do.

The Pike River re-entry was a classic Opposition promise — easy to make, headline-grabbing. But a party expecting to come to power would not want to raise false hopes or waste public money.

There are others. The previous Government had resisted calls for an inquiry into child abuse in state care, for the very good reasons that the institutions at fault no longer existed, compensation claims had been paid and a public inquiry would serve no purpose except to dwell on anguished memories and produce a hand-wringing report.

We got the inquiry. We got commitments to light rail and a bikeway on the Harbour Bridge.

We got a Government unprepared for power and we know how. It need never happen again.