OPINION:
The Queen is dead. Long live the King. Hopefully, that politician — who will in likelihood be crowned tomorrow — will be one with an appetite to lead a much-overdue political reset.
The next Labour prime minister must reign with a softer heart and a harder head.
He must trust New Zealanders with the full extent of what has morphed into a hidden agenda on co-governance, rather than disguise the impact of change under a mountain of spin.
He must be hard-headed enough to face up to Labour’s powerful Māori caucus and take all New Zealanders into his confidence by sharing what’s in store with what is, in fact, a constitutional revolution.
Right now the Government has alienated too many people with its parliamentary stealth tactics over Three Waters in particular. This is not what New Zealanders expected when Jacinda Ardern promised at the 2017 election that she would run an open and transparent government.
I had hoped Ardern would use her persuasive communication skills to lay out her Government’s vision on this score. Not so. It is now up to her successor to tell us how far Labour plans to go with an implementation plan for the He Puapua reforms which Māori Development Minister Willie Jackson has paused until after the election.
The He Puapua plan is said to be a roadmap for how New Zealand should meet its commitments made under the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People. Labour commissioned an initial report in 2019 but it was kept from its coalition partner New Zealand First and not shared before the 2020 election. It was ultimately released in 2021. Consultations have happened with Māori alone.
The next PM must be realistic enough to understand how alienated some New Zealanders feel by a proliferation of Māori place names without education in their use or by taunts to “mind your (white) privilege”.
Jacinda Ardern read the writing on the wall. The antipathy towards Ardern had grown strident in recent months, so much so that the Herald closed off comments on a column I wrote at New Year, advocating that the Prime Minister take the country into her confidence on Labour’s co-governance agenda.
All nine published comments were deeply negative. But that did not stop commenters wanting to have a say — they simply moved to Twitter. These are confronting times, which demand real leadership from the top.
The next prime minister must also be soft enough to empathetically concede that many New Zealanders were hurt by being locked out of their own country during the pandemic.
Soft enough to concede that the upcoming Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Covid Response must hear the personal stories of the Charlotte Bellises and those who missed seeing dying loved ones due to a heartless application of the rules.
Brave enough also to pursue a “truth and reconciliation exercise” to pave the way so that those who lost their jobs during the pandemic due to vaccine hesitancy can again be rehired as nurses, police or defence workers. Not punished permanently.
This may seem counterintuitive, but Ardern’s internationally renowned trademark empathy deserted her mid-way during this Parliamentary term when her Government locked down Auckland on August 17.
While the rest of New Zealand carried on as normal — particularly in the bars and restaurants of Wellington where the politicians and bureaucrats hung out — in Auckland crime ran rampant in city streets while central city police were out policing the border.
Ardern did not visit Auckland until November 10, the day after a massive protest at Parliament against her Government’s Covid-19 response. When vaccinated or tested Aucklanders were finally allowed out a month later, they were treated with fear by other New Zealanders.
These are the undercurrents which persist and underscored the protests on Parliament’s lawn, which did not turn violent until the end. It is trite to simply blame disinformation and people “falling down rabbit holes”, which have played a part in what is now a deeply divided society.
The next PM may have only nine months before the October 14 election. The cost of living crisis will continue to dominate.
If Grant Robertson stays as Finance Minister he will run a tidy ship. But the next prime minister has to unite New Zealanders. He has to be hard enough to axe policies like the media merger, make sure the major centralisation programmes in health and education will in fact deliver.
He must re-scope Three Waters and take a hard look at infrastructure funding. If they can do that, Labour is in with a chance.
Otherwise, just call an early election and get it over with.