Paul Thomas: Pressing the hot buttons

Orewa, let's face it, is a long way from Gettysburg.

High summer at the Orewa Rotary Club isn't the time or place for the vision thing. It's raw politics in the Muldoonist tradition. It's about choosing a hot button and pressing it until all the lights go on.

Last time around Dr Brash pressed the race button. The reaction was spectacular, although a year on it seems more like a primal scream than the much-trumpeted Pakeha backlash.

This year his bony finger jabbed the welfare button. And given that it was a political speech and this is an election year, the only relevant question is: will it work?

The signs aren't all that favourable. For one thing, recent history suggests that New Zealand has become a tough market for conservative causes.

As historian James Belich noted in Paradise Reforged, New Zealand had "seven major issues of contestation and protest in the 1967-1985 period: homosexual law reform, Vietnam, abortion, nuclear power, Maori, environment, rugby with South Africa".

The forces of social conservatism were routed in all of these set-piece battles, opening the way for New Zealand's apparently irreversible transformation into a post-Christian, multicultural, anything-goes society.

Secondly, by vowing to slash welfare handouts the former Reserve Bank Governor, who for better or worse looks like a major egghead crossed with a cartoon bunny, risks coming across as both uncaring and square and its hard to see that combo turning the voters on.

THE Tory pundit Bruce Anderson argues in the Spectator that the albatross around the neck of the British Conservative Party is the perception that its philosophically averse to public spending. He attributes this to the curious legacy of Margaret Thatcher who, despite her propensity for slash and burn rhetoric, in fact oversaw significant increases in public expenditure, especially on health.

The most successful conservative politicians of recent times - Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and John Howard - have, when it suited them, been as profligate as the fun-loving wastrels from Absolutely Fabulous.

Reagan's airy nonchalance over the rising tide of red ink prompted his celebrated quip that "the deficit's big enough to look after itself".

That Britons still associate the Tories with penny-pinching testifies to the staying power of the Iron Lady persona and the fixation of conservatives the world over with tax cuts. Electorates assume, reasonably enough, that tax cuts will be paid for by spending cuts and that tax cuts mainly benefit the rich while spending cuts mainly affect the less well-off.

It is the nature of the beast that conservatives tend to seek inspiration from the United States, where the Republicans have won five of the past seven presidential elections. But it should be pretty clear by now that the US is like no other place on Earth.

Dr Brash was clearly labouring under the misapprehension that what works in America will work here when he reminded us that the Prime Minister is an atheist - she prefers, in fact, agnostic - who dispensed with grace at state functions and displays "indifference to the institution of marriage".

This was a bizarre tack to take on any number of grounds. Whatever Ms Clark's views, her marriage is still going strong after 25 years, quite an achievement in this day and age. By comparison, Dr Brash's private life seems to have been eventful, if hardly exceptional.

And if you're going to demonise your opponent as a godless non-believer, you probably should have set foot inside a church at some point during the past 10 years.

You certainly need to come up with a more forthright statement of your own position vis a vis the Almighty than "people in the 21st century can't believe in articles of faith like the Virgin birth and the resurrection".

Well, actually, quite a lot of people in the 21st century do believe in these "articles of faith". In the American heartland, where they regard the Bible as, among other things, an accurate historical record, they'd be hard pressed to differentiate between this sort of mealy-mouthed diffidence and Comrade Clark-style agnosticism.

These sallies were met with vast indifference, reflecting our consensus on the separation of church and state and our live-and-let-live attitude towards other people's personal arrangements. Dr Brash's subsequent silence on both subjects suggests he got at least part of the message.

ONE of the strengths of old-style, paternalistic conservatism was its acceptance of human imperfection - men and women were inclined to be slothful, to cut corners, duck and dive and get away with whatever they could.

Conservatives governed on the basis that man had long since fallen from grace; their aim was not to make things worse. It was the progressive side of politics that, in defiance of human nature, wanted to build utopia on Earth.

Many people probably nodded agreement at much of Dr Brash's speech, echoing his view that there's a fair degree of waste and a fair number of undeserving beneficiaries in the welfare system. But in an imperfect world with human nature and bureaucracy being what they are, a certain amount of waste and abuse is inevitable.

I suspect that when the dust settles most New Zealanders will take the view that waste, like waste matter, happens.

* Paul Thomas is a Wellington author.