The significant expenditure involved in New Zealand politics is strongly related to the professionalisation of the parliamentary parties. The employees of the parties in Parliament now have significant influence over the parties – many of whom are not even party members of activists. Arguably these state funded professionals have much more influence than any party donors – and certainly more influence than party members and activists. This blog post argues that instead of worrying about growing expenditure on billboards, pamphlets, and advertising, those seeking a stronger democracy and political parties should be concerned about the professionalisation of the NZ party system. [Read much more below]
The trend towards money in politics in New Zealand has been driven by the growing employment of professionals in politics. These professionals are often people who do not originate from within the extra-parliamentary structures, and hence do not have the same ideological background and beliefs as the traditional bureaucrats and activists. Primarily they are carrying out their political functions for financial reward. They are also characterised by expertise in a field, such as communications, administration, research or policy development. They write speeches, design pamphlets, undertake secretarial work, answer phones, devise policy, liaise with the media and so on. These professionals are generally employed for the duration of the parliamentary term and work in the parties’ parliamentary offices. Other professionals hired by the parties are temporary contracted consultants used particularly at election time. These include public relations and image consultants, direct marketers, focus group organisers, specialists in market research, computer specialists, television interview trainers, advertising agencies, and demographic researchers (James, 2001a: p.203; Hope, 2001: p.317). While most of these consultants also work in industries other than politics, sometimes they are specialists devoted to political marketing alone, and therefore work in the political systems of a number of different countries. The most prominent example in New Zealand politics, prior to 2005, was the Act party’s contracting of Gavin Anderson and Koortlang from Australia for their 1996 and 1999 general elections.
These professionals are taking up an increasing proportion of expenditure. In the 1987 election campaign the Labour Party allegedly spent over a million dollars on opinion polling alone (Frontline, 1989).
An important part of this professionalisation is the fact that the professionals are often based in the parliamentary offices of a party rather than the extra-parliamentary headquarters. The most obvious examples of these people are the many media-communications staff that work in Parliament writing news stories on behalf of the party politicians. Because these professionals are paid for by the state, this situation amounts to a system of state funded professionalisation of the parties. As outlined in blog post on Myth 10, the parliamentary parties are given generous resources which are invariably used for party political purposes. There has been rapid growth in the numbers of such party media professionals. Until the 1970s, ministerial staff were generally career bureaucrats from the public service. Press secretaries, for example, were seconded from the Department of Tourism and Publicity. The Third Labour Government initiated a new process in which professionals from outside of the public service were hired and aligned with particular ministers (Brown, 1996: p.65). Then the Fourth Labour Government entrenched this arrangement. It brought ‘in close political allies, or recruited people from business, or from television and the newspapers’ (McQueen, 1991: p.66).
Since then, the numbers have grown substantially. While in the late 1980s the Labour Government employed twelve journalists as ministerial advisers, this was soon substantially surpassed by the following National Government whose 25 ministers used 32 media officers (Hope, 2001: p.314). Over the following years the numbers of media professionals employed by the parties rose even further. By 1993, the Labour Party, according to David Lange, had four times as many media staff in opposition than the party had had in 1984 (Lange, 1993). According to Hope, ‘From 1993 to 1997, the total number of party press secretaries rose from thirty-two to forty-two (an increase of 31 per cent). The number of press gallery journalists fell from fifty-nine to forty-five (a decrease of 24 per cent)’ (Hope, 2001: p.318).
Then by 1998 there were 48 media professionals working for all the parties, and on top of this the parties in Parliament employed another 30 researchers (Bain, 5 Nov 1998: p.9). As detailed in Chapter Eight, the number of staff working in ministerial offices has increased from 45 in 1989 to 232 in 2002. The 2003 Parliamentary Telephone Directory lists 247 staff as working in the ministerial offices. Table 7.6 provides more information on the staffing numbers of the parties in Parliament. The numbers need to be taken with caution, as the directory is not a definitive record of current staffing levels – unfortunately there is very little publicly-available information on state funded staff working for the parties.
Table 7.6: State Funded Party Staff
Party; Ministerial Staff; Executive Secretaries; Leader’s Office, Media & Research; Electorate Agents; Total
Labour 235 25 18 97 375
National 0 27 24 48 99
NZ First 0 8 9 14 31
Act NZ 0 9 11 9 29
Greens 0 9 14 9 32
United 0 5 9 9 23
Progressive 12 1 0 3 16
Total 247 84 85 189 605
Source: Parliamentary Telephone Directory (July 2003)
In 2003, the Labour Party had the most staff working for it in its parliamentary and electorate offices – about 375. This included about 235 staff working in ministerial offices and the Office of the Prime Minister (but not including the separate Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet). It also included a further 25 executive secretaries mostly working for backbench MPs, 12 in Labour’s research unit, 3 in the Government Communications Unit, and a small number of administrators. Collectively Labour MPs also employed 97 equivalent full-time staff in their electorate offices. Compared with the parliamentary offices of the parties, their head offices outside of Parliament were somewhat less well-staffed. Labour’s extra-parliamentary office, for example, had only nine employees (Allen, 1999). The party organisation also has few funds to contract in professionals – evidenced by the statement by Michael Hirschfeld, the party president in 1997, that Labour was disadvantaged in its competition with National in its 1996 election campaign due to its lack of consultants (Hirschfeld, 1997: p.33).
National had the second highest number of staff – about 99. In the Leader’s Office there are 7 employed, while in the research unit and IT section the party has 11 staff, the media unit had four staff, and an ‘advisory’ unit employed 3. Compared to this, the National Party headquarters outside of Parliament had about seven staff (Slater, 1999), although its divisions employed an additional and unknown number of staff. (In 2003 the National Party decided to revamp its organisation, centralising its decision-making and financial administration from the divisions to the headquarters, and therefore many of the divisions’ jobs may have since shifted to Wellington.)
The Green Party had the third highest number of staff, with 9 executive secretaries, the equivalent of 9 electorate agents, and 14 working in the parliamentary offices on media, policy, research and administration. By comparison, the Green Party head office employed just 2. New Zealand First had a research unit of 3 and a Leader’s Office of 7, helping make up a total staff of 31. The next biggest was Act, which in 2003 employed about 29 taxpayer-funded staff in its parliamentary and electoral offices. (In 2003 it was discovered that a number of Act’s electorate staff also worked in Parliament. See: the blog post on State Subsidies for the Act party.) In its extra-parliamentary head office, the party initially employed ten fulltime paid staff, who mostly had a background in marketing (Brown, 4 Mar 1995: p.26). Such staff included former Saatchi and Saatchi executive David Walden, who became Act’s first chief executive; and the former national director of marketing at Coopers and Lybrand, Pauline Hughes, who was Act’s director of communications for a time (Booker and Evans, 1995: p.12; Brown, 1995: p.30). The party has also employed other professionals with ‘backgrounds in the advertising/media/marketing milieu’, such as Scott Woolley, Simon Carr and Keith Davies (Hine, 1995: pp.43-44). Carr has commented that upon joining the Act team he discovered that ‘The place was crawling with communications professionals’ (Carr, 1997: pp.90-91). By 2001, however, the extra-parliamentary party had declined to only one staff member. The United Future party, in 2003, had about 22 state funded staff. Of these, 5 worked in the Leader’s Office, 4 in the party’s research unit, 9 as electorate agents, and 5 as executive secretaries.
In the 1990s, even the more traditional Alliance was modernising and professionalising its operations, hiring ‘spin doctors, market researchers, polling agencies, advertisers, and other communications professionals’ (Hope, 2001: p.317). In 1997, Rod Donald – then an Alliance MP – reported: ‘We are professionalising, growing from a small family firm into a mid-sized company. We have more technology, more staff, and we are doing more planning’ (Donald, 1997: p.46). In their media unit during the late 1990s the Alliance had six employees, including a former Paul Holmes radio show producer, John Pagani, and a former Public Service Association boss, Tony Simpson. The Alliance research unit had five employees. The Alliance’s Electorate Liaison Unit, which was located at Parliament, had four employees, including Alliance president Matt McCarten. Carrying on in Parliament, the Progressive Party has a total of 16 staff, of which 12 work in Jim Anderton’s ministerial office.
The press secretaries working in Parliament are also normally former journalists, and are usually without any previous ties to the party they work for. For instance by 1993 the majority of the National Government’s thirty-two press staff (allocated to twenty-five ministers) were ex-journalists. These ex-journalists are often from the parliamentary press gallery – for example in 1993 the Dominion’s Mike Munro pointed out that there were then nine ex-gallery journalists working as press secretaries (Munro, 20 May 1993). A couple of years later Munro swapped sides too, to work for Helen Clark. He has since been followed into party work by former political editor of National Radio, Richard Griffin; former political editor of the Evening Post, John Goulter in 1999; and former Dominion editor Richard Long in 2003 – all of whom joined the National Party staff. Other significant journalists that have recently worked for the parties include Sue Foley, Tim Grafton, Brian Edwards, Patricia Herbert, and Helen Bain.
As an illustration of the fact that the parties are not terribly concerned with the partisanship of the professionals that they hire, Munro pointed out that before being hired by the leader, ‘Clark didn’t even ask me if I was a member of the Labour Party’ (quoted in Clifton, 27 Dec 1997: p.29). Likewise, when Goulter joined the National Party’s staff, he was reported as insisting ‘that at no time has anyone asked him who he votes for’ (Johns, 1999: p.65). Even Long would only say he was in ‘broad sympathy’ with the National Party (Roger, 2003).
Party staff increasingly switch between parties too. For example, in 2003, Rob Eaddy, who was formerly the National Party’s chief of staff, was appointed to that role with United Future (NZ Herald, 2003b). Other examples include Peter McCardle (ex-National MP and ex-New Zealand First MP) working as the head of Act’s research unit, Neil Kirton (ex-National, and ex-New Zealand First MP) working for the Alliance, and Sue Foley (who worked as press secretary to Mike Moore when he was Leader of the Opposition), then took up the same job with Bill English in 2001.
It is also noteworthy that some of the political party professionals have extraordinary degrees of influence within the parties. As Ruth Laugesen has pointed out, this differentiates modern party professionals from traditional party workers: ‘While the backroom kingmakers have always been around in the established parties, today’s kingpins have emerged from the reliance that new under-resourced parties have to place on a few committed individuals’ (Laugesen, 1996c: p.13). Therefore, although not necessarily household names, the professionals behind the scenes of many of the parties are becoming acknowledged as important players in the direction and operations of the parties. Since the mid-1990s, people like the Alliance’s John Pagani, Labour’s Heather Simpson, New Zealand First’s Michael Laws, National’s Richard Griffin, and Act’s Simon Carr were all seen to be more important than MPs. For example, Jane Clifton commented in 1997, ‘MMP’s first tumultuous year makes for familiar reading, but there’s a subtext. It was shaped by Richard Griffin... and three rival major party press chiefs. At times, the four operated as unelected MPs’ (Clifton, 1997e: p.28). She also pointed out, ‘The Alliance’s John Pagani is the only true believer among the spin doctors. The others insist on a non-party "professional communicator" label’ (ibid: p.29).
By contrast, the party presidents during this period have come to be considered increasingly insignificant – no political commentators have talked much about the influence of John Slater and Judy Kirk (National), Mike Williams (Labour), Doug Woolerton (New Zealand First), Catherine Judd (Act), Ian Stephens, David Clendon, and Catherine Delahunty (Greens), Marty Braithwaite (Progressive Coalition Party). Where the presidents have been high profile and seeking strong influence – Michelle Boag (National), Bob Harvey (Labour), and Matt McCarten (Alliance) – they have suffered severe resistance and fallout from the party MPs as a result.
The party professionals clearly do have a lot of influence over policy. For instance, Laugesen has outlined how during the 1990s, Labour’s Research Unit Executive Director, Heather Simpson, not only oversaw Labour’s policy, she wrote ‘most of it herself with input from shadow spokespeople and more junior staff members’ (Laugesen, 1996c: p.13). Similarly, much is made of the influence that Margaret Pope had on the direction of the Fourth Labour Government from within the Prime Ministers’ office when she was David Lange’s speechwriter. Michael Laws has also admitted to being virtually solely responsible for the 1996 rewrite and re-direction of New Zealand First’s economic policy (Laws, 1998a: pp.323-331). Within the Alliance during the 1990s, it was well known that it was the head of their media unit, John Pagani, who wielded the greatest influence on leader Jim Anderton, and therefore upon the whole party.
The role of professionals is not only changing in the parliamentary offices of the parties, but also in the extra-parliamentary organisations. In a previous era, the activities of the head offices were, according to party theorist Peter Mair, ‘directed towards the organisation and maintenance of the party on the ground (a key concern in the mass party)’ but are now ‘increasingly directed towards the mobilization of support in the electorate at large’ (Mair, 1994: p.13). This is certainly the case in New Zealand where organising the membership of a party is now an insignificant role due to the insignificant numbers of people belonging to the parties.
Professionalisation is especially advanced in terms of electioneering. The 1987 general election is regarded by some as representing the arrival of the modern and professionalised campaign to New Zealand politics. The Labour campaign in that election was certainly a turning point in regard to the employment of market research professionals. The Labour Party strategists based their campaign decisions and marketing designs heavily on a sophisticated opinion polling system. This new elite of media specialists and other experts are now playing a major role in every element of the campaign – from deciding the campaign issues through their market research initiatives to organising media coverage. For their 1999 election campaign, the Labour Party even paid $70,000 for an ‘events professional’ to organise their campaign launch at the Auckland Town Hall (NZPA, 1999o: p.12).
An obvious and basic example of the relationship between the use of labour and capital resources in a party’s election campaign is in the distribution of written material to voters. While parties have traditionally had activists deliver their pamphlets, leaflets and manifestos to voters’ letterboxes, this is now changing. To a certain extent traditional delivery still occurs, but there is a growing trend towards the use of commercial direct-mail techniques that appears irreversible. According to Alan Ware,
Leafleting requires a lot of people to distribute the propaganda; direct mail solicitations today may require very little labour, but considerable sums of money for postage. (Lists of potential recipients can be bought from various sources on computer disks, and envelopes can be addressed and franked by computer, so that only a small number of people are required for such an operation) (Ware, 1996: p.308).
This is also illustrated by United New Zealand’s Mark Stonyer, who rejects the need for a large membership carrying out the traditional party activities like delivery of party propaganda: ‘This is the 90s – with that sort of stuff you can send all your electioneering and other mail-outs to a mail centre who will print, fold, envelope, seal, stamp and distribute for you for the same price as a postage stamp’ (Stonyer, 1999).
The employment of advertising agencies is one of the most obvious examples of the professionalisation of the parties’ campaign activities. The increase in professionals and consultants involved in electioneering is also obvious in a physical sense, as Bob Harvey has noted: ‘As the cavalcade has grown, where Norman Kirk and Sir Keith Holyoake would move around the country with maybe a secretary only, now twenty advisers cram a private plane. Motorcades and bodyguards are now part of the New Zealand political scenario’ (Harvey, 1992a: p.109).
One of the main reasons that parties need to professionalise is because their whole connection with society has changed and thus they need expertise in order to create new ways of linking with voters. A whole host of trends makes for a difficult campaigning environment: old allegiances have broken down; traditional party ideologies have become confused, new and minor parties now threaten the more established ones, young people do not vote with their parents, and voter turn-out has dropped. The rules of the game have thus changed, and parties can no longer rely on established methods and linkages to communicate with voters and win their support. In this environment the parties have sought to employ professionals to utilise superior organisational and communications skills to connect with an increasingly volatile electorate. Similarly, professional aid is also required by modern political parties due to the fact that voters are now somewhat antagonistic, untrusting and cynical towards New Zealand political parties. This anti-party feeling means that selling a political party is now a lot harder and requires new ideas and more sophisticated and subtle methods – which is the area of expertise that the party professionals provide. Also, because general elections are now a ‘privatised’ event – as opposed to a public one – parties need professional advice on how to communicate with a distant public. Whereas the public used to attend election rallies in large numbers, take public meetings seriously, and generally participate in the campaign, they now stay in their homes or seek alternative entertainment. There is a widespread disengagement with politics by electors, and it is the job of the professionals to connect and communicate with these electors. Parties cannot rely on such passive campaigning methods as TV advertising, but need to get proactively in contact with the public. Party activists, it seems, have failed at this task or are no longer able to perform it because of their declining numbers. Hence more than ever before the political parties have to go to the electorate, as the voters are not participating in the campaign by choice. The parties therefore deliver themselves to the voters through computerised mailing lists, commercial mail drops, more innovative television and so on (Vowles et al., 1995: p.56). It also should be pointed out that party professionals are now more useful and valuable because elections under MMP are more of a national campaign (for the party vote) rather than a local one in which local activists organise marginal seats.
The shift towards electoral-professional parties, with the growth in party professionals, can also be read as an indication of the essential weakness of contemporary parties, rather than their all-powerfulness. As David Lange has commented on the exponential increase in media employees in the 1990s, ‘Journalists have no cause for anxiety. The presence of paid mouthpieces in such numbers is not evidence of the Government’s ability to manipulate the news. It’s a measure of its weakness’ (Lange, 1993). Yet the growing professionalism of the parties is also disturbing the balance of powers that exist between the parties and the media. According to Maharey, ‘politicians are operating in a more sophisticated way and with more resources at a time when journalists are stretching to do even a basic job’ (Maharey, 1992: p.96). The number of media professionals employed by the political parties in Parliament now outnumbers those employed as journalists in the press gallery. By 1998 the 48 media professionals working for all the parties now outweighed the 45 journalists working in the parliamentary press gallery (Bain, 5 Nov 1998: p.9).
In this way, the employment of a party professional may signal that the current parties have little of interest to say and therefore need to invest in media specialists to dress-up and disguise their emptiness. The dominance of the professionals is also a reflection of the changed nature of the election debate, as politics has been shifting away from issues, ideology, and policies towards personalities and superficial politicking. The parties therefore need people who can specialise in making headway in this environment. Media and communications experts are clearly better at this job than party activists.
Crucially, the need to professionalise also comes from the simple fact that professional methods are now seen as superior to the traditional. As senior National MP Murray McCully has argued, ‘The advantage that a skilled professional can score over an enthusiastic amateur is now quite significant’ (quoted in Harris, 1993b). Media-orientated strategies are now quite simply the ‘most effective and efficient tools for disseminating their propaganda – much better, for example, than relying on amateur door-to-door canvassers or speaking at the local town hall’ (Rudd, 1989: p.35). The move to professionalism is also due to the growth of the importance of the electronic media. Inevitably the consequence of campaigns dominated by the electronic media is the desire of political parties to increase their own professional expertise for using the media. As Atkinson has argued, ‘New Zealand politicians gradually came to realise that, since television could not be avoided, they would need help in coping with it, particularly at election times’ (Atkinson, Dec 1989: p.98). And, of course, when one party professionalises, it encourages a similar reaction from the others, leading to an inflation of professionalism in the campaign: ‘As soon as communications specialists started supplying it to them, election campaigns began to take on the now-familiar, more visual style of “media walkabouts” and “camera opportunities”’ (Atkinson, Dec 1989: p.98). Therefore a vicious circle of increasing professionalism is created.
The consequences of professionalised media-centred politics are, of course, quite considerable. Most importantly, there is a policy dimension – in the sense that policy can be more inclined to lose its prominent role in campaigns. As Steve Maharey has argued, whereas politicians used to spend much of their time on issues of policy, ‘the constant search for publicity takes precious time away from these essential tasks of a politician’ (Maharey, 1992a: p.94). His own experience led Maharey to believe that ‘media handlers become more important than policy advisers’ (ibid: pp.94-95).
At the heart of the shift from mass parties towards the electoral-professional model is the increase in paid party employees. This party professionalisation is the flip-side of membership decline in New Zealand parties. There is a ‘chicken and egg’ type question as to whether the trend towards professionalisation and away from the more traditional activist-orientated model is due to the declining ability of the membership to carry out their traditional activities, thereby necessitating professionalism, or conversely that professionalisation has led to membership decline by effectively superseding the membership with the use of techniques which are superior to the traditional ones. It seems that the shift to the electoral-professional model is changing for both these reasons and the declining membership and the increasing professionalisation reinforce each other. There can be no doubt that in New Zealand much of the work traditionally carried out by traditional party bureaucrats and party activists is now being carried out by party professionals and consultants.
[To be continued]
[Bibliography to be added]
