Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern: "Mike, if you're saying you're now someone of nuance and subtlety, bless." Photo / Getty Images
Diana Wichtel
If you have no regrets, you probably haven't been paying attention. One of mine: during the 60s I wouldn't wear an Anzac Day poppy. It wasn't just pacifism. My father was a Polish Jew. I wouldn't exist if no one had taken up arms against Hitler. But we were engaged in an intergenerational struggle against The Man. With the cloudless conviction of youth, we knew we were right. Okay, that decade had its aberrations – encounter groups, salad in jelly ... But the big battles – Vietnam
, Women's Lib, civil rights, gay rights, anti-nuclear – landed on the right side of history. The world changed.
Now we're in the midst of another potentially transformative intergenerational struggle – climate, Black Lives Matter, gender, inequality - against the backdrop of a global pandemic, an election campaign that's bizarre even by our standards and a busted Auckland Harbour Bridge. Really, 2020?
Everything's up for grabs again. Hear the dinosaurs roar over too much te reo, masks, the intolerability of youth-adjacent female leadership. See symbolic encounters between Jack Tame and Winston Peters on TVNZ's Q+A. It's like watching a dyspeptic grizzly bear batting away a whippersnapper of a wasp. Tame fires some apparently unanticipated questions. Peters calls him a "Philadelphia lawyer" and, wonderfully, "Billy the Kid". Mostly he called him "James". "My name is Jack," sighed Tame. "Well, James," Peters carried on remorselessly. "James, James, James ..." Tame signed off with, "I'm James Tame!" Winston rode into the sunset with a parting, "Good lord!"
It echoed Simon Walker's 1976 televised tango with Robert Muldoon. Muldoon called Walker "Alec", as in, "I will not have some smart alec interviewer changing the rules of the game halfway through!" The immortal scrap signalled that, when it comes to media deference to power, the rules of the game really had changed.
Some things haven't. When Jacinda Ardern ran against Nikki Kaye in 2011, an overexcited media ran amok with "Battle of the Babes" headlines. "All short skirts and long legs ..." began a NZ Listener story. As new Labour Party leader, Ardern honed her T-shirt-worthy accusatory index finger when pestered to disclose her reproductive plans on breakfast television. Hilariously, considering her first term's disaster-plagued workload, some suggested she would be a part-time Prime Minister because she had a baby. So many media men of a certain generation so threatened by a woman just doing life. Ardern and Judith Collins get "Cindy" and "Judy" (Collins seems to prefer "Crusher"). Muldoon got "Piggy". There are Mike Hosking's Newstalk ZB musings about "Queen Cindy". We know how women in public life get treated. There was Australian broadcaster Alan Jones' "shove a sock down her throat" incident. Yet Ardern keeps valiantly fronting up to what must be dispiriting interrogations - "You were caught with your pants down!" Hosking once snarled at her. These days some personalities perform more like animated noxious social media memes than broadcasters. Still, Ardern is perfectly equal to wresting control of the tired, sexist narratives she attracts. "Mike, if you're saying you're now someone of nuance and subtlety, bless," she laughed one mad morning.
Speaking of things intergenerational, in level 2.5 my daughter took me on a road trip north. We passed the patch where you crawl through Warkworth having a debate about everything. She thought I was over-sensitive to anti-Semitism (I'm not) and had some work to do on 21st-century gender politics (I do). I realised that one thing my generation hoped to create was a changed parent-child dynamic, one where we can thrash out differences (reader, we yelled) and, on a good day, no one gets sent to their room. You spend your life explaining the world to your children. There comes a time to stop and listen as they explain to us this crazy mixed bag of a planet that we're handing them. The ride through Warkworth was challenging. No regrets.
Next week: Steve Braunias