Q+A’s Panel Discussions with Paul Holmes, Dr Therese Arseneau, Former Prime Minister Mike Moore and Former Political Advisor Richard Griffin

The full length video interviews and panel discussions from this morning’s Q+A can be seen on tvnz.co.nz at, http://tvnz.co.nz/q-and-a-news

PANEL DISCUSSIONS led by PAUL HOLMES

MMP Discussion

PAUL: Good morning. MMP - do we need an MMP debate – do we need this referendum Therese?

THERESE: Well I think it’s interesting he’s kicking the tyres of MMP, whether it does that depends very much on the question – because the question that he seems to be considering is should we sell the car or should we keep it, because the question seems much more should we get rid of MMP or keep it? But I think that ignores a third option and it’s an important option because I suspect it’s where a lot of people will actually fall on the spectrum and that is there are things about MMP they like, there are things about MMP they don’t like. Well, before we sell the whole car maybe its worth considering what they don’t like about MMP and see what we can do to tweak it and to fix it. That would be my preferred option.

PAUL: Does anybody really not like at the moment do you think?

RICHARD: Just the mad dinosaurs who seem to come from the extreme right who can’t get over the fact that no longer is their party in control after an election, determined to put first past the post back in place with no other options on the table.
I can’t believe we’re still going down this track – let’s take the system and make it work. First past the post was a disaster.

PAUL: Exactly, we’ve had the debate – I suppose Winston, if you look at Winston Peters and say he took MMP to the extremes, he really manipulated MMP…

RICHARD: No he didn’t, he played the game. The game is on the table, you know it’s a game. We put in place the pieces where we want them.

MIKE: I don’t believe it’s a game ….

PAUL: Do we need the debate?

MIKE: I think we do, but I’d like to see it go wider. We make ad hoc decisions at our peril. We change the honours list, we get rid of the Privy Council, let’s have another flag, we become a bi-cultural country not a multi-cultural country. We make constitutional changes at great speed and risk. And I think… the treaty in my lifetime has gone from “the treaty is a fraud” to a holy document. All these things should be folded, I think together , over a period of time, beyond the life of one government when passions cool, work up and drive up a new set of constitutional arrangements through a special convention, over ten years – just not an adhoc decision. Now MMP has worked reasonably well because we’ve had ten years of the best economic growth in history. But come on, Winston says he’s not going to join National and does –just recently a small man from a small party spat the dummy and said this is what’ll happen in Auckland…come on, with ACT, and each time you see this happen.

THERESE: But that’s how these people who are in the system are using it and operating within it, and there are ways to change it. For example, I think we need to look at whether we need that one electorate seat threshold, I think there are ways that for example, we could possibly shift the balance in terms of the number of list MP’s versus electorate MP’s.

MIKE: But 10% of the people think Elvis is alive. Why don’t we have a 10% threshold in seats based on proportionality?

RICHARD: You’ll irritate more people than you will soothe…

MIKE: But my view is fold all these constitutional issues into one major thing...

PHIL GOFF & JIM ANDERTON DISCUSSION

PAUL: What is he up to, Mr Anderton, in your view, Mr Moore?

MIKE: Well I don’t know where to begin! There was no coup on Bill Rowling during the election campaign. In England the co-operative MPs are sponsored by the Co-Operative movement, they run as Labour. I don’t think this really matters. He’s running at 0.2 percent in the opinion polls, he’s in as an independent member of parliament because Labour puts up a half wit against him every time – as National do for Peter Dunne – he collects more than a couple of hundred thousand a year as party leader, let’s get over it. And Jim of course was the president who wanted to retire at 70. Now here’s the thing – let’s go to what Phil Goff was saying, I think Phil is doing the right thing.

PAUL: No, let’s stay with Jim Anderton for a moment.

MIKE: Oh must you! No one else is talking about him.

RICHARD: He’s a very effective member of parliament…and generally speaking when he puts his mind to things something happens. You can guarantee that if you’re taking anything to parliament and you want a response, Jim Anderton is the man who was going to give it to you. He’s been very effective for the 25 years he’s been representing Sydenham – he’s been brilliant for Sydenham. And you’re right, Labour’s never put up a decent candidate against him for obvious reasons.

MIKE: Nor National against Peter Dunne – this is MMP.

RICHARD: But would he be missed, yes I think he would be missed because he’s been a focus of a lot of advice for both Helen Clark, and prior to her as you say, to Bill Rowling.

PAUL: But what is he doing? Is he handing the Progressives to Labour, is that what he’s doing?

MIKE: There’s nothing to hand across – except this. There’ll be 38 activists who’ll want to go on the party list, who’ll want jobs in head office, in the leader’s office and they represent frequently the most unpleasant and the most unattractive side of the left. And they will burrow in – they’re the chardonnay socialists who use the word mate because they think workers use it, and then they go to their vineyards and call each other furtively “comrade”. They are not pleasant and they are not votable.

RICHARD: It’s not exactly resurrecting the Labour party is it – and I’m going to say watching Phil Goff, there’s no vitality there. I remember when Mike Moore went to Palmerston North after their last huge defeat and the party was revitalised just as a consequence of one speech from that conference which essentially said we’re turning aside from Douglas onto a new track and this is what it is. They haven’t told me where they’re going yet and they’re still seem to be annoyed they’re not in government.

MIKE: Phil is turning the page, it is a new chapter for the Labour party in New Zealand – he’s turning the page, he’s doing the right thing.

RICHARD: By God if he’s turning the page I haven’t seen the page turn!

PAUL: Therese what do you think…

THERESE: I thought it was better than I’ve seen him recently. Something was different, but the problem with Phil Goff is that he doesn’t tend to hit the bulls eye. He gets close but doesn’t quite get there. For example, he raged on about the Jobs Summit when the focus should have been on the jobs, he went too far with Richard Worth. The thing is when you look at a leader, the job description, there are three main roles. The managerial side, the interpersonal and the rhetorical. I would argue the first two he’s quite good at and we’ve seen that when he was a cabinet minister. He’s a good manager, he’s good at keeping his party together when they could have been turning on each other….the problem is that last part of the job and that is connection. And parties now, especially since the age of television, parties come to life through their party leaders and he’s not yet really sprung to life and really he doesn’t yet really personify the party.

MIKE: And yet he’s got the now and he can do this, and speak for our battlers – those people who work at night cleaning other people’s vomit in pubs to build a fence, and they’re proud of their home, and then somebody goes and graffitis that fence and some person on the state payroll gets up who’s a commissioner and says “we should balance the children’s rights to express themselves with the rights of property owners who own a fence”. That enrages, it makes ordinary battlers get livid.

PAUL: We didn’t get any sense of that this morning….

RICHARD: Those battlers are all brown these days or damn near. They don’t recognise the red flag, they don’t come from your background (Mike) and Phil’s background, they’ve never sung the internationale, they couldn’t give a damn about foreign affairs, they are the people who are going to keep Labour in power and he’s lost it.

THERESE: You’re missing the point, the battlers are more concerned about growing their income than they are about the graffiti on the house.

MIKE: ….Oooh, they are concerned about both….

THERESE: The graffiti on the house is the salt in the wound. The wound itself, and this is where I do think Labour lost the plot in the last term of the government, they lost the plot because they became obsessed with spending the pie instead of growing the pot and if they had got the basic thing right which was, if our standard of living was rising instead of falling, if they had been spending money on things which would help increase productivity, increase the size of the pie, then those other things wouldn’t have mattered so much but they lost the focus on the important things.

RICHARD: They also patronised, they were always holier than thou, and the electoral finance act was the last nail in the coffin…

MIKE: I rang Phil about the electoral finance act before it was passed and I didn’t get a response and I wrote my first article giving my friends the flick!

PETER GLUCKMAN DISCUSSION

PAUL: So what do we make of Professor Sir Peter Gluckman?

MIKE: Not enough. We don’t make enough use of him – he has more money to spend in Singapore than he does in New Zealand. His case, well he’s working in Singapore as well, this is a global citizen. Here’s the go – he says in British cabinet papers evidence in science has to have a report on cabinet paper. In New Zealand Treaty of Waitangi and Women’s Issues. We have to do better, and more…

PAUL: So sorry, cabinet papers have to have effects on how they relate to Treaty issues and Women’s Issues…

MIKE: Well in my day, there’s probably about four more now.

PAUL: But British cabinet papers have to have a scientific, have to have science facts…

MIKE: If you think about it, since the enlightenment we have had to live by evidence and reason. We do not live by evidence; we do not live by reason. We live by car stickers. The right wing saying embryonic research is terrible, the left wing say GM’s terrible. We don’t have to think, we have a car sticker to think for us. Rational thinking, evidence based solution is long overdue.

RICHARD: Bring Politics into the mix, as did happen, the DSIR was fragmented which was a ridiculous decision made by Politicians who knew nothing about science, and we’ve ended up now with a dispersal of income from taxpayers to science that simply forces to reinvent the wheel. Into the bargain, as Professor Gluckman has already pointed out, the people who do qualify here, and we do train scientists really well in this country, within a year the vast majority of them have left, they’ve gone they’re doing something offshore. Now we might be training them for the world market, that’s fantastic, but it’s not really helping us. We don’t focus on science here to any relative degree at all. Anywhere else in the western democracies they put a huge emphasis on science; we seem to have forgotten it exists. Professor Gluckman made a point to me and I find it disturbing just before we came on air, that while we worry about methane gases the rest of the world science is concentrating on coming up with artificial meat and milk. Where does that leave our economy in 20 years time?

THERESE: One of the great things that John Key has done is that he has brought different people in for advice and Sir Peter Gluckman is an excellent example of that. Because let’s look at the big problems facing New Zealand, be they economic, social, environmental science is going to be the key to solving all those problems We talk a lot and we hear a lot from the government about raising productivity, and infrastructure’s become the magic word, the silver bullet that’s going to solve all our problems. And so far the focus has been on pretty basic infrastructure, things like roads. Science provides us the Rolls Royce of infrastructure – when you think back to all the leaps we’ve had in productivity it’s because of some form of research, technology and science and that’s where we need to put some more focus.

PAUL: Interesting that he also includes social science, I found that fascinating in the Ag Research piece. If social welfare is not working, examine why and change the policy –change the way you do it.

RICHARD: We have no evidence to support the contention that pumping money, as Labour has done over the last ten years into our society with very good intentions, but no evidence to tell us how it works or if it works at all.

MIKE: You can prove it gets worse, and you can prove in schools it’s getting worse and we can prove the prisons don’t work but you see we have this car sticker mentality and up comes an NGO, with respect to our Media the stories that appear in our newspapers now are generated by pressure groups and spin doctors.

PAUL: Can I talk about what you might be looking forward to in the week ahead…what’s going to be making the news?

THERESE: Well, we didn’t get too much about the Labour Party Conference and I think it’s going to be crucial now –Phil Goff will be making a speech – but what will be really crucial now is looking forward. I think Phil Goff has spent far too much of the first year looking back and today we hear there’s going to be some mea culpa about what wrong in the election – that’s only going to be useful if it somehow forms a path forward.

PAUL: Admitting guilt is hardly leaping ahead…

THERESE: And Helen Clark was not good at it at all.

MIKE: Oh we admitted everybody else’s guilt all the time!

PAUL: He (Goff) must have a great deal of difficulty with Helen running the Labour party by text from New York!

MIKE: Oh give it, us, a break. The big news in parliament will be the local government Auckland system where we’re going to have a senior federal system. The better news should be on how Labour regenerates and offers New Zealand a choice on competition, and that is getting back to our core strugglers and battlers and those people who want to own things.

PAUL: Yet again he’s got to hit the bullseye hasn’t he!

ENDS

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