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Friday 25 May 2012

What’s John Key’s secret?

The charisma-free NZ PM’s popularity is mystifying  

Barring an unimaginable last-minute upset, John Phillip Key can look forward to another three years in the prime minister’s office on the ninth floor of the Beehive, the idiosyncratic building (supposedly conceptualised on the back of a table napkin during a boozy dinner) that serves as New Zealand’s seat of government.

In the last week of an election campaign foreshortened by the Rugby World Cup, in which the All Blacks obligingly delivered a feelgood victory, opinion polls suggested Key’s National party might win enough votes to govern without the support of a smaller partner. The only thing threatening to rain on his parade was the nightmarish prospect of perennial spoiler Winston Peters holding the balance of power.

Key is that rare creature in contemporary Western politics, a popular leader. Julia Gillard, Barack Obama, Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel — all struggling to reverse stubbornly low approval ratings — could be excused for wondering what magic incantations he secretly recites.

Many New Zealanders scratch their heads in wonderment too. Key is a political enigma: neither charismatic nor visionary, and not even especially articulate. Indeed, his Kiwi accent is so grating that wealthy property investor Sir Bob Jones is said to have offered to pay for him to take elocution lessons. (Key’s favourite word is ‘ackshully’, which he pronounces in a way that makes Gillard’s rasping Strine accent sound almost euphonious.)

Under his leadership New Zealand’s economic performance has been lacklustre at best, although admittedly at a time of almost unprecedented global uncertainty. Economic growth is sluggish, the government is borrowing an eye-watering NZ$350 million a week and core state spending has reached 35 per cent of GDP, a level that must have the Labour party’s neo-socialists burning with envy.

The goal of catching up economically with Australia, a priority when Key won office in 2008, seems to have been quietly abandoned. A government-appointed taskforce assigned to find ways of closing the trans-Tasman economic gap was disestablished after its recommendations — which included massive cuts in government spending — were dismissed as ‘too radical’. Since then the wage gap with Australia has continued to grow (New Zealanders on average earn nearly 40 per cent less) and more than 30,000 Kiwis a year vote with their feet by migrating to what is cynically known as the West Island.

What, then, are Key’s political attributes? The answer says as much about New Zealanders as it does about their Prime Minister.

Voters seem to find his lack of polish and charisma endearing. New Zealand’s last charismatic leader was David Lange, the Labour prime minister of the 1980s, whose government — which ended in total disarray — is not generally remembered with affection.

Kiwis, ever distrustful of ideology, are also reassured by Key’s pragmatism. The radical economic reforms pushed through by Roger Douglas, Lange’s finance minister, may have saved the country from becoming the South Pacific equivalent of a Polish shipyard (to use Lange’s memorable phrase), but most New Zealanders perversely remember them only for the pain they caused. They like Key because he continues a New Zealand tradition of consensus and moderation that stretches back to Sir Keith Holyoake in the 1960s. It’s an approach that favours incrementalism over boldness, even when circumstances cry out for the latter.

Key is non-threatening, another quality that New Zealanders seem to value in their politicians. He’s friendly, down-to-earth and approachable — qualities that appeal to women voters, whose support the National party has often struggled to attract. His apparently imperturbable optimism helped to comfort New Zealand in a bruising year that included two catastrophic earthquakes, a massive finance company collapse, a mining disaster, a record $18 billion deficit, credit rating downgrades, a devastating bacterial attack on the kiwifruit industry and a container ship stranding that threatened the country with its worst environmental accident. Few New Zealand leaders have been so tested by fire; but if Key felt the pressure, it didn’t show.

Only in the last weeks of the election campaign was his composure tested, when the media turned the heat on him over the leaking of an illicit recording of his conversation with the candidate for the ACT party — a National party ally — in the highly strategic Auckland seat of Epsom.

It was a rare occasion when Key looked rattled, and it highlighted one of his few political weaknesses: his cockiness. The conversation took place over a cup of tea at a carefully orchestrated media event in an Auckland café. The media were there in force to witness, through the glass, Key’s symbolic endorsement of the ACT candidate; but it backfired spectacularly when a recorder picked up indiscreet and potentially damaging remarks.

It was a case of an over-confident Prime Minister taking a careless risk, just as he had in parliament several weeks earlier when he attacked Labour over something reportedly said at a private briefing by credit rating agency Standard & Poor’s. When it turned out that Key had got it wrong, New Zealanders had the rare experience of seeing him visibly unsettled and reluctant to acknowledge his error.

But just as Key’s self-assurance got him into difficulty over the so-called ‘teapot tape’, so his sharp political instincts got him out of it. Confident that the public wouldn’t see it as a big issue, he batted media questions aside — an approach that was vindicated when opinion polls showed the controversy had left him virtually untouched.

Those political instincts, combined with Key’s geniality and lack of rigid ideological beliefs, make him the perfect Prime Minister for New Zealand’s proportional electoral system, under which the two major parties must stitch up deals with smaller allies in order to form a government. He is a consummate schmoozer and wheeler-dealer, able to get disparate parties onside and to make the compromises that coalition government demands — even if it means swallowing a few dead rats.

While this endears him to centrists and believers in touchy-feely consensus politics, it frustrates the hell out of conservatives who choke at the spectacle of a supposedly centre-right party adopting a quixotic emissions trading scheme, helping to pass a law that criminalised parental smacking, losing its nerve in the face of environmentalists’ protests over mining and sneakily ratifying the activist Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (the latter done to humour Key’s Maori party coalition partners).

Will Key show more daring on the big economic issues in his second term? No one’s holding their breath. National’s most radical proposal is a partial sell-off of several state-owned companies — hardly the last word in economic rationalism, and even that has made voters nervous. The smart money is on three more years of cautious incrementalism under the guise of stability. Oh, and lots more smiling.

More articles from: Karl du Fresne | this section

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