Terry Moyle: The antics of a pathological naughty boy

Opinion

In the mid-1990s West Auckland's Waipareira Trust was a touchstone Maori success story. Bland, well-groomed and overpaid public servants would come and be PRd in that strange assortment of buildings overlooking the carparks of Henderson.

Politicians would come to posture for photographs, and shake the hand of the new face of Maori, the champion of urban Maoridom, the trust's chief executive, John Tamihere. Things looked good as Mr Tamihere sought the Hauraki seat.

His comments lately are no different from his utterances back then. From the outset he was ambivalent about joining the Labour Party. Someone even remarked at the time that he should have joined Act.

In particular, the views he expressed of MPs then were much as they are now. These comments have been excused as "blokism", but Mr Tamihere has been advised on ways of dealing with the media. Obviously he knows what is appropriate behaviour and what is inappropriate. His conduct has nothing to do with articulating or modelling some kind of "red-blooded male" influence on his party.

His recurring comments during the Hauraki campaign in 1998 were that "it [politics] wasn't me", and there was always a strong sense of him feeling that leadership had been thrust upon him.

There was the burden of years of expectation from politicians, the media, the members of the trust and the Labour Party. He was the man tipped to be the first Maori Prime Minister. This was all very heady stuff to a self-confessed Maori boy with a poster of Che Guevara on the walls of his untidy Henderson office.

Although Mr Tamihere could work a room like no politician I've seen, I always considered him a private person. He conveyed a vulnerability that was enormously attractive to people and could be charming but which tended to be reflective.

I think this aspect of his life - to conform, or rather feel he had to conform, to so many other people's expectations - precipitated resentment.

He was also conscious at the outset of not defining himself as a politician. This might go some way to explaining his penchant for taking risks and his apparent antipathy towards many of his colleagues.

His preference was - and remains - for communications strategies that are aggressive and combative, and he has difficulty understanding alternatives. His pugnaciousness is one of his defining qualities; it makes him tactically dumb.

Risk-taking is the stuff of the revolutionary, is anti-establishment and, of course, makes interesting news. Government and party politics is the management of risk and creates bland news. The selection of Mr Tamihere for the Labour Party saw an individual quite conscious of his unsuitability for political life embracing it.

He brought to his politics an ideal that somewhere in the rough-hewn, drinkin' and fishin' real-bloke constituency, there is a truth and a real, obviously male Labour Party. It is a nostalgic, myopic, self-righteous vision that has enormously affected his ability to manage political representation. It persists in seeing itself as moderating and centralist influence on the "politically correct" members of that party.

The views and language expressed in the Investigate article have advanced little on those of 10 years ago. They illustrate also his compelling ability to communicate depth of vision and simplistic bigotry in the same sentence.

More concerning are the primitive moral viewpoints embraced by him and laid ferociously bare. A fundamental principle of the Labour Party - and, indeed, democracy - is inclusiveness, the antithesis of the thinking that led to Mr Tamihere's comments on gays, women and Jews.

Unfortunately for him, the rhetoric, the humour, the need to elucidate the point was not recognised by Ian Wishart, Investigate's editor. The filtering process that Mr Tamihere might have expected from the media, as of right, was not there on this occasion.

This style of dealing with the media, plus a self-deprecating attitude and profanity, was as conscious as Mr Tamihere's preference for T-shirts with jackets. It is unlikely that he sees anything wrong in his statements. He might agree that they were foolish, but not that they were wrong; just pathological naughty boyishness.

But, of course, the statements are wrong, and it is not a matter of an interview that got screwed up or a long-term conspiracy by Act. Mr Tamihere's views betray something chilling, something we do not like to see in the people we regard as our leaders. Whether they were on or off the record is academic.

The real problem is Mr Tamihere himself, not the world, the Labour Party or whatever. With a vision of himself as a wronged Kiwi bloke, and a diamond-hard resistance to good political and personal advice, he is tragically locked in needless battles.

These battles are likely to become unbearable as he resists the only right thing to do. Indeed, such resistance represents simply the triumph of ego over common sense. Other careers would provide greater personal happiness and satisfaction. This after all, as he would agree, is just politics.

To use the sort of football analogy that Mr Tamihere loves, he is an expensive signing who has not been a team player. He drops the ball all the time. He does not trust the coach and management. He does not fit the team nor does the code suit him particularly.

This, however, was not a couple of guys kicking a ball around. It was an MP talking to a magazine called Investigate. Also, Mr Tamihere is a lot older than when he was Metro's Man of the Year. He is a family man in his mid-40s, a fact that increases the folly of his tasteless comments.

There should have been only one course of action. Real men walk.

* Terry Moyle worked for the Waipareira Trust as a public relations adviser to Mr Tamihere for several years. He was his campaign manager when he sought the seat of Hauraki in 1998.