The Speaker of parliament is only ever seen as either the chairman at question time or the landlord of parliament and on both sides he frequently runs afoul of the gallery media who seem to prefer a relationship based on mutual disrespect with all politicians.
In actual fact, in terms of New Zealand as an organisation, business or social agency, the Speaker is the chairman of the Board and the Prime Minister is the CEO. Nobody much pays attention to the Chairman of the Board role because all the fun stuff, rhetoric and the value of column inches of broadcast advertising is in the muck raking of politics and not constitutional diplomacy.
New Zealand has about two visits a month to the Speaker from parliaments, as opposed to governments, around the globe. They do this because we are seen as world leaders in managing a stable and long running democracy and because we can pull together the disparate groups, creeds and ideologies that make up our parliament and still maintain functioning, certain and steady minority governments. Other countries don't have our record in being able to do this. Not only that, they value it much more highly that the average kiwi and certainly more highly than the average gallery journalist. I guess this proves the adage that "familiarity breeds contempt", and in the lines of Joni Mitchell "You don't know what you've got till it's gon.." Ask a Fijian, a Northern Irishman or any citizen of Eastern Europe about that, and they will reply like the historian at the Berlin Wall last week that "democracy and freedom are not self-evident", they need support, monitoring, measurement and accountability to be real. New Zealanders might be a little more circumspect if they'd lost their democracy within their living memory.
I have never seen an article in a newspaper which reports with any degree of pride on the performance of New Zealand constitutionally, diplomatically or even respectfully. We have spent forever telling ourselves that New Zealand is a pimple of the bottom of the globe, and nobody of any substance either knows where we are, what we are about or could give a stuff either way. Interestingly after a week in Germany I didn't meet a single German who hadn't been to New Zealand or had a child who had been or a close friend or relative who wasn't about to go or about to come back. They do know who we are and what our brand is. The Polish the same, the Irish and French very similar.
Kiwis like to say we punch above our weight. We tend to quote this with respect to sport and business, but there is loathing reluctance, if in fact anybody knows, that we do this best in democracy. It is the scathing regard for parliamentarians that the gallery media has, and the emphatic egalitarian nature of New Zealanders, that no virtue could ever be found in a politician. But Politics and diplomacy are different pockets in the same pair of trousers. So when a Minister heads offshore to talk business deals and defence force engagement, justice policy and human rights, they don't do this like a Speakers Delegation who cover the same ground but in a different way. In our discussions on the latest Delegation, on every occasion in nearly every meeting we talked free trade, the role of agriculture, education, science and research, and the contributions of New Zealand to gaining stability after the first and second World Wars and the combat role that preceded that. Their response was "we are so glad you won".
