Jane Clifton signs off after 30 years of Listener columns
Robert Muldoon: A known quantity. Photo / Getty Images
Inauspiciously, the first thing I wrote for this magazine was a political column, at a time when there was pretty much no politics.
It was 1996, after our first MMP election, and for nine weeks the ship of state was, if not rudderless, devoid of politicians. Labour and National were courting New Zealand First for a coalition deal while senior officials ran a caretaker government, and the cone of silence over both was absolute. MPs being terrified into keeping quiet, the nearest thing to a scoop was whether gingernuts were on the tea trolley. Had anyone leaked a Mallowpuff sighting, the stockmarket would have imploded.
Obviously, once released from enforced inter-party ingratiation, they turned on one another with redoubled vigour, and the politics column sometimes practically wrote itself.
Aptly, this, my last Listener column, has followed three years of a different sort of mute button. My husband’s diplomatic posting meant New Zealand politics, for me, was cancelled. Detoxing from a habit of several decades had its wall-climbing moments, but at least being overseas I could “vape” other countries’ shenanigans.
My illustrious predecessor here, Tom Scott, once said he hoped never to age into being the old git who lurks at the edge of parties, raging, “I knew Muldoon, you know!” Me neither – but a quick valedictory lap is hard to resist.
The most resonant comment for me since I joined the press gallery in the mid-80s is from the late Jim Bolger, made to my esteemed gallery colleague Richard Harman a few months ago: he believed his chief task as prime minister was to bring New Zealanders closer together. Simple, and a churl might even say trite, but it’s the truest measuring stick. Yet without there being war or a similar emergency, it’s about the hardest thing to achieve in politics.
Mining grievances is more electorally rewarding and less personally demanding than building bridges. It’s terrifyingly easy to get ahead of public tolerance for change, and to preach rather than listen and persuade.
The big calls most New Zealanders are proudest of – such as nuclear-free and free-trade leadership, and progress in redressing Māori grievances – spanned changes of government. In other words, cross-party agreement is essential. It insulates opposing parties from electoral punishment for their courage. Yet, through ideological cussedness, our parties have for years refused to agree even on desperately needed infrastructure.
Something I’d love to reminisce about but can’t, is a time someone admitted frankly they’d got a policy wrong and ungrudgingly changed it. Bolger, and David Lange before him, altered fiscal course – but while blaming their erstwhile finance ministers for exceeding their bounds, as if prime ministers never set those limits in the first place.
Most policy decisions are mini-pandemic equivalents in that they can only be made on the best available advice, which is always subject to change, and with a limited means of controlling outside forces. What made sense yesterday may not look so hot next year. Sometimes, it’ll be irreversible. How refreshing if, instead of defensiveness, we got the reasons for the mistake.