As soon as Act was in Parliament, there was a perceptible shift in the party’s activity. As the Parliamentary caucus sprung into action, the MPs looked less like Roger Douglas protégés, and more like the leader, Richard Prebble. While the Act leadership probably thought that their first year in Parliament was a time to define the party’s brand more clearly, the new MPs ended up being identified with trivia, side-issues and gossip. [Read more below]
The populist side of Act emerged early in Act’s Parliamentary existence, when Rodney Hide launched his anti-perks campaign. Hide’s campaign sought to expose the alleged extravagant use of tax-payers money by politicians. Hide released material that was critical of individual MP’s expenditure on such things as taxi-chits and air travel, and he subsequently became known as the 'Perk buster'.
The main Act campaign of 1997 was its opposition to a proposed Ministerial office building behind the Beehive. There is no doubt that this was a populist campaign. Prebble later spelt out how Act was able to convert what was a logical debate into a simplistic and emotional argument:
the key thing was calling the proposed building a Palace. It reduced issues of cash flow analysis, net usuable area, book value versus opportunity cost to a simple question of whether you were in favour of a Palace to house politicians. Calling it a Palace on television was probably the single biggest factor in the project's demise: no-one in NZ can be in favour of a Palace (Prebble, 1997: p.45).
Act found few credible arguments to defend their new populist behaviour. Richard Prebble offered one explanation in his 1997 book, What Happens Next?:
Act used the two campaigns of '97 for two very important functions, neither of which were generally obvious. The first thing both campaigns did was to define Act as a party distinct from National, with its own identity. We showed we were prepared to stand up on issues we believed in.... The second thing Perks and the Palace did for us was to establish our credentials with the media (Prebble, 1997: p.37).
According to Prebble, Act had needed a campaign ‘to show that we could be effective’ and to dramatise the Act philosophy. The populist issues were judged by the caucus to be what they were looking for (Prebble, 1997: p.23).
Behind the scenes, however, the campaign had caused considerable unease within the party. Although the opponents of Act’s new populist style within the party did not necessarily disagree with Hide’s campaigns, they saw such issues as peripheral to the deeper policy message that they believed the MPs should be working to promote. Roger Douglas, in particularly, was apparently ‘worried that the easy headlines have come at the expense of real political progress’ (Clifton, 10 May 1997).
Related to this, one of the party’s new parliamentary outputs was The Goss, a gossip sheet put out by fax and email. This represented the new Act style – The Goss was trendy, witty and lightweight. Unsurprisingly, Roger Douglas was said to hate it (Carr, 1997: p.120).
Prebble, who claimed to be against the populist strategy, talked in detail about the range of views within caucus:
It was an issue divided between those of us who had been in Parliament before on one side and the new MPs on the other. One view said: it's a trivial issue; it's not what we'd come to Parliament for; that everyone in Parliament would resent us; that Parliamentarians are appallingly paid and the perks are some small compensation, they were part of the terms of the contract we took the job under; and as a list MP Rodney didn't realise how hard the rest of us worked. On the other hand, the new MPs argued that the system of perks and allowances was a financial outrage; we'd never had so much media coverage; accountability was an intrinsic Act position, and it proved that Act was not only serious but capable of running an issue that dramatised our policy' (Prebble, 1997: pp.38-39).
The populist strategy made quite an impact on the 1997 political year, as Hide had wanted it to, but in the final instance the campaign did not appear to increase support for Act in the opinion polls. If anything, the strategy has simply further obscured the party’s deeper policy message.
Next blog post: The National-Act relationship
