Dialogue: Let's stay tolerant, accepting of others and all for a fair go

By GORDON McLAUCHLAN

One day in 1967 I called on the Prime Minister's secretary, Jim Anderson, who had been with Keith Holyoake since his days as Minister of Agriculture. Anderson - a clever, funny, edgy man - was laughing to himself and when he saw me he said, shaking his head: "They never learn."

"Who?"

"Lobbyists. A group of cockies arrived, belligerent as hell. They were gonna put the PM against the wall. Well, they've just left after a couple of hours. Confused is the best description of how they looked. Confused and defeated."

Yet during the 1960s Holyoake effectively strove always to govern by consensus and was often reviled for it. The criticism bandied about the streets - in those days when protesters still used the streets - was that the country lacked leadership, that the Prime Minister was a pompous role-player, a fop, allowing the country to stagnate under what was scornfully known as "consensus politics."

But the fact is that Holyoake was working within a New Zealand tradition, and he was Prime Minister for a record 11 years.

After the economy collapsed in the 1880s, the country got overwhelmingly behind the Liberals in legislative moves to reconstruct it. Again in the 1930s, during the international Depression, the Labour Party won an overwhelming mandate to break the shackles of orthodox economic practice and redistribute wealth in a way that would revive the nation.

The politicians who led those passages of change weren't ideologues. They applied common sense, and even conservatives and left-wingers accepted reluctantly and often argumentatively that serious problems needed coordinated, drastic action.

Holyoake had learned the political trade during the divisive years that straddled the social and economic rupture of the 1951 waterfront strike and resolved to avoid that kind of schism between left and right. So again consensus reigned after catastrophe.

But because the world economy was still recovering from the Second World War and because of relatively high commodity prices, New Zealanders had a standard of living second only to Americans. We could tread water and still have prosperity. Understandably, we did stagnate a bit.

But it's also worth remembering that the Holyoake Government organised the National Development Conference at the end of the 1960s and anyone who looks back at its findings will be impressed at how many of its consensual recommendations would have helped us into the future.

However, the entry of Britain into Europe, the oil shock and the death of Prime Minister Norman Kirk jolted us into the hands of Rob Muldoon, and for the first time New Zealand eschewed consensus and opted for a "strong leader."

The difference between the catastrophes that pushed us towards consensus in the past and the crisis that began in the 1970s is that it has simmered and never boiled, pustulated and never come to a head. We have been for 25 years a querulous, squabbling society, snared in divisive indecision.

But now, it seems to me, we are fumbling towards constructive, consensual politics again as we rediscover that it is culture in its broadest sense and not some arcane economic theory that will lead us to a new sense of well-being, a shared view of how we want to develop as a people.

That doesn't mean a society without healthy dissension, but one that accepts that the route to prosperity demands common sense and compromise.

For nearly 15 years, an ideological establishment, supported by the corporate sector, was unyielding in its certainty of Tinabo (there is no other way but ours). When most people were neither convinced nor compliant, this establishment pondered the techniques involved in "selling" its ideas. At last it understands that the simple truth is that too few New Zealanders want to buy them.

In the meantime, corporate business has a damaged reputation for demanding absolute primacy in the allocation of social and economic resources, yet underachieving in enhancing the national wealth. Business is a creative and inclusive activity and, hopefully, the new decade will see the sector rebuild both its reputation and its growth in which we can all join.

So what are the shared, abiding qualities that have brought New Zealanders to consensual politics in the past and, hopefully, will again?

First, above all the others, is tolerance and acceptance of difference, the strong belief in a fair go. This is the hardest country in the world in which to buy a fight on religion, politics or race. An argument, yes; a fight, no.

The greatest tribute to Pakeha and Maori is that in no other country where an indigenous people as large as 13 per cent was seriously ripped off during the great European expansion in the 19th century has rapprochement been sought and largely achieved, without violence.

Leaving old wounds suppurating without attempting to heal them is what happened in the Balkans, Northern Ireland, the Middle East and every other trouble spot. Maori and Pakeha, bravely and generously, are reconciling their differences.

You know, there's a positive side to being a passionless people. Our common sense is not obscured by rabid support for ideas or beliefs which so often leads to hatred of opposing creeds. I think of W.B. Yeats' Prayer for My Daughter:

... to be choked with hate

May well be of all evil chances chief.

If there's no hatred in a mind,

Assault and battery of the wind

Can never tear the linnet from the leaf.

An intellectual hatred is the worst,

So let her think opinions are accursed.

And what the Austrian-born Jewish scholar and journalist George Steiner said of the English I think applies here, and I think it a compliment: "This land is blessed with a powerful mediocrity of mind. It has saved you from communism and it has saved you from fascism. In the end you don't care enough about ideas to suffer their consequences."

I don't believe ideology will ever take in New Zealand, either. I've travelled a lot in recent years and have come to the conclusion that as a people we have energy, intelligence, open minds, generosity and a serious intent - disguised sometimes under irritable rhetoric - on giving others a fair go. It is these qualities that have helped us in the past to produce so many remarkable people for the world stage.

Herald Online feature: Common core values

We invite to you to contribute to the debate on common core values. E-mail dialogue@herald.co.nz.