NZ People Must Heed Call of Abraham Lincoln

Whatever else you may read online this week, you MUST read the guest post on Kiwiblog by education advocate, Alwyn Poole: “When the government is incompetent or distracted.“

If you don’t get to read the whole post, at least ponder this extract:

Although the exact words of Lincoln’s Gettysburg speech are a little disputed the sentiment has been carried through great democracies and needs to be incredibly important in our beautiful nation:

“that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom —and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

We have always considered our leaders to be benign, but our single House system is incredibly lacking in checks and balances especially when a party has a full majority and our population is, by and large, passive and accepting. Being “nice” is no qualification for leadership. Being effective and providing opportunities for people to improve their lives is. The great Douglas Adams provided a superb warning against people who aspire for political leadership:

“The major problem—one of the major problems, for there are several—one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them.
To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it.

Alwyn’s principal gripe is against the leadership of Labour and the Greens for their abject capitulation to the teacher unions. They scrapped the system of charter schools which was successful in promoting learning to many recalcitrant or indifferent young Kiwis who were failed by those employed by the Ministry of Education. They were unable to motivate or even interest them, but Alwyn strikes a vital chord saying:

New Zealand needs good people to do good things regardless of who gets the credit. The government is ineffective and incompetent but to sit back and watch them continue to fail does no person any good. Be proactive.

This is a well overdue call to each and every one of us concerned for the future of our country.

Especially, it is a call to members of the National Party as some 460 of them gather in Wellington’s Michael Fowler Centre next Saturday for their 2020 Annual General Meeting in the wake of a devastatingly failed General Election campaign that reduced it from a robust Parliamentary caucus of 54 to a rump of 33 (more of this later).

Alwyn Poole’s reminder of that legendary Abraham Lincoln definition of democracy as “government of the people, by the people, for the people” and his closing emphasis on “by the people” has, in 2020, more relevance to New Zealand than ever – certainly since the mid-1930s.

For the first time since we made the fateful change in 1996 to MMP, we have governance by a single party. It has no one but itself to blame for any lack of ability to steer us safely through a turbulent time economically and, therefore, socially, as we adapt to changes forced on us by the COVID-19 pandemic. The proverbial buck now stops with the Labour Party, and Labour alone.

For its leader Jacinda Ardern especially, it‘s time to walk the walk rather than talk the talk; to put up or shut up. Post-election, she seems to have shut up. Her daily 1pm message of “Be Kind” as we navigated the lockdowns that cost so many of us our livelihoods, is gone from our screens. Is this an indication that for Ms Ardern, the pandemic was an election-winning blessing in disguise? Her post-election silence as our self-proclaimed saviour from Covid would seem to be its own answer to that question.

And what to make of Ms Ardern’s post-election enthusiasm for participation in foreign affairs? No adverse reflection on the abilities of Nanaia Mahuta, but was her selection as Minister of Foreign Affairs by the Prime Minister meant to make it easier for Ms Ardern to involve herself, and does this mean more emphasis by her, as befits a former president of International Socialist Youth, on more of the socialist elements of the UN’s Agenda 2030?

All of this should be a wake-up call to us as voters, about the “by the people” element of Lincolnesque democracy. More of us – many more of us – need to become political realists, and in so doing, make ourselves more active as politics-watchers and doers.

Which brings me to the National Party, for whom the first order of business at the AGM next Saturday must be to take the necessary steps to regain “ownership” of the party and direction of its affairs and policies. To take that “ownership” back from the organisational leadership that failed us so miserably in the recent election campaign. Such a crusade inevitably requires changes in leadership personnel. Heads must roll; new heads must be found, and elected.

Within National’s Parliamentary wing, new leader Judith Collins has already read and enforced the Riot Act. As a long-time National Party activist, grateful for acceptance by Ms Collins’s Papakura Electorate as a co-opted member and voting delegate after a fall-out in my home North Shore electorate with its former and unlamented MP, I’ve already told Judith that she needs to regain her “Crusher” mojo, and ensure that this Labour Government is constantly held to account for what is very likely to be a string of errors both of commission and of omission.

I was born to a working-class family and in Hamilton in 1935, shook the out-stretched hand of the saintly Michael Joseph Savage. We shifted to Grey Lynn in 1942 and in the aftermath of the expulsion of John A Lee for daring to criticise his party’s leadership, all it took to convert me to National was a newspaper appointment to Pahiatua, where the resulting acquaintance with its MP, Keith Holyoake helped me realise the essential difference between Labour and National: Freedom to speak your mind and even to acquire a reputation within National as a stirrer without an ounce of rebuke.

So it is with confidence that I recommend to BFD readers: join the National Party.