Past sins continue to haunt National's leader

By JON JOHANSSON*

In 1980, the United States' youngest governor for more than 40 years, one Bill Clinton, was thrown out of office, in part because he had stung Arkansas voters with a 10-fold increase in their driver's licence fees but also because of a perception among Arkansans that the young, ambitious politician had succumbed to hubris.

Clinton's Machiavellian pollster Dick Morris then conceived a strategy to re-launch the future president. It was as elegant as it was successful.

Clinton offered a very public mea culpa when he announced his gubernatorial candidacy in 1982, an apology for misunderstanding the real needs of Arkansas voters during his earlier governorship.

Clinton's public apology was typically Southern - "My daddy never had to whip me twice for the same thing". It brilliantly inoculated him against any and all negative attacks about his previous record as governor, and his career returned to its golden track.

Morris remembered that "we felt like we were behind bulletproof glass, watching somebody aim at us and pull the trigger and watch the bullets splatter harmlessly".

Might Bill English and the National Party regret ignoring a similar strategy before this campaign?

This was crystallised when John Campbell lobbed the Michael Fay grenade at English during TV3's leaders' debate.

One could only commiserate with National's inexperienced leader because he was, and is, defenceless against such attacks. In many people's minds, rightly or wrongly, Michael Fay equals Michelle Boag equals Winebox equals corporate malfeasance during the deregulatory phase of the 1980s and early 1990s.

This is not a positive for National, especially while Michelle Boag is ensconced as party president, while Michael Fay prefers exile in Switzerland, and while National struggles to state where it is positioned on the political spectrum.

Fay and Boag represent an easy target, but there are deeper reasons for discomfort.

Bill English stated not long after assuming the leadership that he and the party had moved on from the debates of the 1980s and 1990s. Maybe so. But a more germane point is whether the public has.

First, though, the master skill of political leadership is to accurately discern one's context. Helen Clark's reading of the mood in 1999 with her Blair-inspired credit card pledges, and then keeping them, have fuelled a perception that the Prime Minister has restored a measure of legitimacy and trust to the political system after 15 years of broken promises, a concerted period of arrogant governance, and, of course, Winston Peters' perceived betrayal in 1996.

Within this entire period, the National Government of 1990 to 1993 stands out as having made the most serious error.

After National's historic landslide win in 1990 on the back of Labour's farcical second term, Jim Bolger should have recognised the country was hostile to further policy volatility (especially the neo-liberal kind).

More pointedly, they were hostile to restructuring being imposed from on high without any attempt to prepare people for the tumultuous changes they encountered.

The Ruth Richardson-led attack on welfare, the "there is no alternative" mantra to justify such policies, and, of course, Bolger's infamous "no ifs, no buts, no maybes" broken pledge on the superannuation surtax all served to reinforce more of what voters had emphatically rejected in 1990.

Bolger's first term served to cement a perception that National were mean and, like the fourth Labour Government, promoting policies that benefited the wealthiest few in the country.

Bolger discerned this in 1993 when he put an end to further restructuring and successfully prepared the country during its transition to a new electoral system.

What should Bill English have learned from all this? A very public mea culpa for not preparing the most defenceless in society for the Richardson benefit cuts, and for inflicting more policy volatility than voters had ever given them a mandate for, would help attempts to move National on from its past.

Such an apology would, more importantly, serve to differentiate National very clearly from Act and would push it to the centre - the only ground where National can hope to defeat Helen Clark when the political tide eventually moves away from her and her Government.

What is also clear is that it is too late for English to contemplate such a strategy, even if he were of a mind to, with less than two weeks of campaigning to go.

But it will have to be done by the National leadership sometime. The most poignant question for Bill English is whether it will be him, or someone else.

* Jon Johansson lectures in political leadership and American politics at Victoria University.

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