Neil Sands & Vihan Dalal
New Zealand’s political leaders have allowed minor parties to hijack the political agenda at the expense of ‘common-sense’ policies that benefit the nation, former Prime Minister Helen Clark says.
Too much political energy is being expended on the likes of the ACT Party’s Treaty Principles Bill, she said, when the focus should be on major challenges such as replacing ageing infrastructure.
Whether it’s the Treaty Principles Bill or anti-DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) legislation, it’s all dragged to the fringe and that’s not good, Clark told a breakfast function, hosted by TLANZ, in Auckland earlier this week.
Clark, who led New Zealand as prime minister from 1999 to 2008, said detailed coalition agreements negotiated under the MMP system had helped create the problem.
While forming coalitions to govern is a fact of life under MMP, she said recent coalition agreements containing multiple demands, or ‘bottom lines’, from minor parties gave the smaller players too much influence on the political agenda.
“What we’ve seen in more recent years under MMP is the parties on the fringe dragging the centre parties with them,” she said. “We’ve got to get back to more reasoned discussion across the line. We need more discourse across the broad centre of politics.”
Clark said coalition agreements should be flexible and without bottom lines, giving major parties the ability to set a centrist agenda in government.
As an the example, during her own time in office a free trade agreement with Singapore was opposed by Labour’s coalition partner, the Alliance.
But that coalition agreement simply required all parties to work together in good faith, with no surprises. This allowed Clark to reach out to National on the opposition benches for the support she needed to finalise the deal.
“That’s the formula that should have been stuck to,” she said, “instead of this nonsense of ‘well, I’m going to support a Treaty Principles Bill to a second reading, because that’s a bottom line’. This is ridiculous. It needs much more pragmatic approaches to governing to give the major parties more scope to move across the line and not be dragged to the extremes.”
No progress
Clark said another obstacle to good government involved major parties putting political rivalries ahead of sound policy.
Citing New Zealand’s infrastructure deficit, she said reforms enacted by one major party were ditched by the other side when there was a change of government, resulting in a lack of progress.
“[We] looked at the reasons for the infrastructure deficit and a major one is this stop-go routine we’ve got into on infrastructure,” she said. “Because one side’s done it, the other trashes that and we waste a lot of money in the process and we don’t get anything built, good or bad. I guess the Auckland transport system has been a bit of a victim of that.”
Clark said when her think-tank, the Helen Clark Foundation, released an infrastructure report last year, both the relevant government minister and the opposition spokesperson attended, finding they had common ground on the issue.
“[They said] ‘yeah, look, you’re right, we need to talk more’. I’m kind of hopeful that maybe the Infrastructure Commission will, with good consultation, produce a forward plan that can have buy-in from both sides and we can agree as a society on what are the key infrastructure issues and get on and build them.
“Because a lot of our core infrastructure now dates back to the 1950s and society is a lot larger than it was then and we need to do better.”
Newbies in charge
Clark said a lack of experience among the current crop of politicians and public servants also impeded good governance.
”We have a lot more newbies, people being promoted very early with very little experience,” she said. “[They] don’t know how to run departments… You need to get your officials close, you need to get good advice.
“I think the quality of the public service is also not what it was. So if you got a lot of newbie politicians who never run anything much before… [and a] less capable public service, it’s not surprising we don’t get much done in three years.”
She did not know if a four-year term would improve matters but criticised a proposal currently before Parliament to consider an extended term if changes to the select committee system are also implemented.
The proposal – which was a coalition agreement bottom-line for ACT – involves extending terms from three to four years while also giving the opposition extra representation on select committees to act as a check on executive power.
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