liberation

The public funding of boozy political party conferences

The most interesting and bizarre part of the Auditor-General’s report on Phil Heatley’s crooked expenditure of public money has been the declaration that the public should pay for politicians to attend and drink at political party conferences. This is a significant line in the sand being crossed – that the costs of parliamentarians attending extra-parliamentary party events should be funded by the public. This shows just how dodgy the parliamentary rules are. And more than this, the rules have been shown that they are so lax that they can be legitimately interpreted to say that the public should pay the bill when politicians buy fellow party members bottles of alcohol. The only problem that the Auditor-General seemed to have with public money spent on such activity is that Heatley paid for it with the wrong account. [Read more below]

Conspiracy against Hide? Or Conspiracy by Hide?

There are two conspiracy stories about the alleged November 2009 leadership challenge in the Act Party which is still dogging the party today. The dominant version about the so-called failed leadership coup is that deputy leader Heather Roy and maverick MP Roger Douglas conspired to topple Rodney Hide from the leadership position within Act. A second conspiracy theory that deserves some attention is the idea that the whole story is actually a beat-up, or at least an exaggeration, and that the story has actually been encouraged and exaggerated by Rodney Hide himself. Thus, rather than there being a conspiracy against Hide, there might well have been a conspiracy by Hide. This blog post outlines that possibility. [Read more below]

Key to Victory – Jon Johansson on political change in the 2008 election

Although the 2008 New Zealand general election led to a change of government, it wasn’t exactly a big-change election. Rather than heralding a complete change of policy direction, the election mostly offered more of the same. These points are well made in a chapter entitled ‘Leadership during transition’ by Jon Johansson in the new post-election book Key to Victory: The New Zealand General Election of 2008 (edited by Stephen Levine and Nigel S. Roberts). Johansson also looks at the question of ‘What drives political change in New Zealand?’ and whether there has been any sort of generational shift in political leadership. [Read more below]

Politicians should be paid to be representatives not careerists

Are New Zealand politicians overpaid? According to a new Massey University survey, Cabinet ministers are indeed grossly over-remunerated. Voters apparently think that ministers should be paid about $135,000 a year instead of receiving the $245,000+ salary they currently get. This blog post examines the detail of the survey, looks at some of the reasons that politicians are held in such low regard, and argues that MPs and ministers should only be paid the average wage. In effect serving in Parliament should be considered a representative honour and duty, not just a career, and therefore parliamentarians shouldn’t be treated as being above – and separate from – society via an extravagant pay packet and lifestyle. [Read more below]

Key to Victory – Media coverage of the 2008 NZ election

Commercialism Vs Professionalism. That’s the tension present in modern media coverage of politics according to Babak Bahador, who’s written a very good chapter entitled ‘Media coverage of the election’ in the new post-election book Key to Victory: The New Zealand General Election of 2008 (edited by Stephen Levine and Nigel S. Roberts). Bahador asks, ‘So how did the New Zealand media balance these forces during the 2008 election? Did they follow commercial trends in other Western democracies towards increasingly partisan, negative, presidential and superficial coverage? Or did they maintain a reasonable degree of professionalism in their coverage and fulfil their democratic duty?’. He attempts to answer these questions with a comprehensive content analysis of the New Zealand Herald, Dominion Post, the Press, and TV1 and TV3 evening news. He comes up with some very interesting results. [Read more below]

Act’s problem – Roger, not Roy

Pity Heather Roy. Suddenly the low-profile deputy leader of the Act Party has become the party’s she-devil – a subtle and manipulative plotter out to destroy everything she has helped the party to gain. This is a commonly-held analysis in the New Zealand political world at the moment. But guest blogger and Act-watcher Geoffrey Miller puts forward another interpretation. He argues below that the party’s real difficulty is the 72-year old backbencher – Roger Douglas – who has, Rodney Hide told Miller in 2007, ‘always bagged his own team, he's done that his entire life in politics, and so he's continued’. Roy, by contrast is merely rational, rather than radical, and unlikely to have been a ringleader in the 2009 failed Act leadership coup. [Read more below]

Key to Victory – Political imagery in 2008

The Labour Party thought that the 2008 New Zealand general election would be won on the issue of trust (i.e. voters becoming suspicious of ‘slippery John’ and his ‘hidden agenda’), whereas National thought it would be won on the issue of leadership personality and engagement with voters (i.e. the idea of Helen Clark being an out-of-touch elitist vs ‘common John’ who could relate socially to ordinary Kiwis). In the end, Labour was wrong and National was right, and critical ‘image events’ helped determine National’s win according to Claire Robinson’s chapter entitled ‘Images of political leadership in the campaign’ in the new post-election book Key to Victory: The New Zealand General Election of 2008 (edited by Stephen Levine and Nigel S. Roberts) In fact, National effectively won the election back in mid-2007 by fighting and winning on the issue of leadership personality. [Read more below]

The politics of Amanda Palmer

The musician, and sometimes-political activist, Amanda Palmer is in New Zealand for three gigs over the next week. Palmer is one of most interesting artists around at the moment. Combining ‘theatrical rock, punk cabaret, manic-musical, neo-glam-torch’ together, she normally works as the lead singer and pianist in the duo of the Dresden Dolls, but at the moment she's doing other solo and collaborative work. Amanda Palmer’s songs are described in the press release for her latest New Zealand tour as ‘astute, witty world observations’, which is almost an understatement. Elsewhere Palmer’s songs have been described as dealing with ‘the often brutal emotional and sexual lives of a diverse cast of misfits, crazies, compulsives, and sociopaths’. One song, ‘Night Reconnaissance’, from her last album expresses her sympathy with teen socialist rebels plotting revenge against tormentors ‘from good homes’. [Read more below]

How scientific is political science?

Should political scientists be neutral, detached from politics, and objective? How scientific can the study of politics be? These questions are discussed in an excellent opinion piece published yesterday in the Guardian newspaper. The author, David Wearing – a PhD student in Politics – argues against ‘The prevailing view within the discipline… that scholars should set aside moral values and political concerns in favour of detached enquiry into the mechanics of how the political world functions’. He argues – quite correctly in my opinion – that the attempt to borrow from the ‘hard sciences’ and be apolitical and neutral is a con. Better, he says, to openly acknowledge your politics and values and not pretend to be something you’re not. He also defends the place of ideology within academia, saying, ‘Ideology – the place where theory and morality meet – is, at its best, a dynamic rational tool, vital to the task of building knowledge. It is when our personal ideologies are taken for granted, or left unexamined, that they lapse into dogma, and it is therefore important that this is not allowed to happen’. More importantly, intellectuals should be criticising power from an explicitly moral standpoint – Wearing says that ‘The willingness to critique is vital to intellectual activity, and the contribution to wider political discourse of scholarship that challenges power is crucial in a functioning democracy’. Another good point he makes is that when ‘scholarship is described as too political or too polemical, what is really meant is that it is insufficiently consistent with, or too critical of, mainstream priorities and assumptions’. I couldn’t agree more, and think the study of politics should be deliberately critical of existing politics – of political parties, of the institutions that they interact with (such as Parliament, the interest groups), and existing public policy. This critical approach does not emerge out of a desire to criticise or be negative, but from the belief that all institutions – and particularly those that play a role in administering society – should be subject to rigorous evaluation.

Destiny Church’s Family Party splits up

Not only is the Destiny Church facing all sorts of internal ructions relating to its financial affairs and control, but the Christian political party that is an outgrowth of Brian Tamaki’s church - the Family Party - has just applied to cancel its registration with the Electoral Commission, and hence dissolve itself. The Family Party – one of three Christian-based parties that sought the party vote in the 2008 election – originally went under the name of 'Destiny New Zealand', until a major reconfiguration occurred prior to the 2008 general election. 

The Family party history

Centred on the evangelical and fundamentalist Destiny Church of televangelist, Brian Tamaki, the Family party was essentially a reconfigured and re-branded version of the Destiny New Zealand Christian political party that operated between 2003 and 2007. Tamaki and his church wound up the Destiny party in an attempt to create a larger Christian party that would incorporate the main Christian leaders from rival parties, including Gordon Copeland and Philip Field. Such a grand merger never eventuated, but the new party launched and registered in 2007, with Destiny Church’s Richard Lewis as leader and the deputy leadership taken by Paul Adams, a former United Future MP and pastor at the Pentecostal City Impact Church. The party concentrated its efforts on winning votes from Māori and Pacific voters, especially in South Auckland, but in the 2008 election won only 8,176 party votes (or 0.35 per cent of the total vote).

The deregistration process

The application to cancel the Family Party’s registration with the Electoral Commission is made under Part 4 of the Electoral Act 1993, and has been done so by the party’s secretary, Anne Williamson. The Electoral Commission says that anyone who wishes to comment on the application may do so by sending an email to email [email protected] by 5.00pm, Wednesday, 10 March 2010.

The Heatley scandal and the parliamentary culture of entitlement

Political finance scandals continue to plague New Zealand parliamentary politics in an entirely corrosive yet illuminating way. The latest scandal – the fall of Housing Minister Phil Heatley – once again helps the public understand the nature of the political Establishment in this country. It shows that the ‘class’ of people that run our society are infected with a ‘culture of entitlement’. Each new scandal and revelation shows that, as Matt McCarten has put it, there is ‘an ethical sickness’ in our Parliament. This blog post elaborates on this ethical sickness, by showing how politicians like Heatley epitomize a ‘born to rule’ and hypocritical elite that now pervades Parliament. [Read more below].

Labour’s latest taxpayer-funded electioneering

The Labour Party obviously hasn’t learned much from the severe public ignomany suffered when it was revealed that the party had been paying for its electioneering Pledge Card with public funds while in government. Their latest rort – running a heavily branded bus campaign around the country – is no less electioneering, yet Labour has once again used taxpayer funds to pay for this political advertising. This blog post looks at whether such electioneering can really be called ‘legitimate’, even if the exercise is made to fit into the dodgy Parliamentary Service rules. Regardless of the expenditure’s legal status, few voters will appreciate having to pay for such overt political advertising. [Read more below]