Giving credit where it is due like TOP: crime, MMP, and coffee table politics

Who would you vote for today and why?

I’m leaning towards The Opportunities Party (TOP), though I would need to look further into their current policies before I voted. What I’ve seen from TOP in the past is that they take a measured approach and they’re quite willing to say publicly that another party is doing something well. That’s important for me, as it makes it easier for me to trust them. It’s a nice change to politicians just pulling people down all the time, which is how much of our politics seems to work.

In the past I’ve voted for the Māori Party, though I have become quite disillusioned with them recently. The reason I really liked them originally was because I think their former leader, Tariana Turia, was brilliant. She had this great approach to politics where she was able to advocate for issues, but also work together with other parties and give credit where it was due. She did politics how it should be done, in my opinion. For me, her leadership set up the Māori Party as a reasonable, balanced party. The Māori Party has been quieter, more recently; though that is probably because they have mostly been campaigning to the Māori electorates, which makes sense. But then I was seriously unimpressed during the pandemic, when the current leader accused the Government of genocide. This was the opposite of everything I had liked about them: it felt reactive, excessive and inflammatory.

I don’t feel particularly strongly about Labour versus National. I would lean towards Labour, but a National Government wouldn’t upset me. I am concerned about the growing power of the Act Party; so I’m more concerned about the friendship between National and Act than I am about National itself.

Can you tell me more about your concern with the Act Party?

Well, David Seymour kind of annoys me. But more importantly, I find some aspects of the Act Party dangerous, especially their tough-on-crime policy stance (such as their previous three-strikes policy). I think this approach dehumanises people who commit crimes. It sees them as terrible people; rather than people who may have done terrible things, but who are still humans with their own stories, backgrounds, and reasons. Yes, we need to stop people behaving in ways that harm other people; and yes, there needs to be consequences for crime. But the moment you start treating them as ‘other’ then you forget that, if your life circumstances had been different, who knows whether you would have been one of those ‘criminals’ too. If you’re willing to hold that possibility open, then it leads to a healthier and more effective approach to dealing with the issues, rather than just punishing people because we think they’re evil. I’m far more in favour of a restorative approach, which is something the Māori Party has done well in the past. This is really important to me: a party’s policy approach to crime is probably the biggest determiner for how I see the party overall. That’s because I believe the way we treat the people on the margins—which in our society is often those who commit crimes—says the most about our attitudes to everything else.

How would you perceive people who vote for the Act Party?

Why do you think they vote that way? I could be wrong, but I think the reason for the Act Party’s sudden rise in popularity is because they were the only party willing to come out and blatantly say they think that lockdowns were a bad idea. They were loudly opposed to any kind of Government control during the pandemic. There are a lot of people who feel strongly about the Government’s response during covid, and these people gravitate to the only Party that they think really understands them. So I’m not sure if everyone who currently says they are going to vote for Act are really Act supporters; they are more just people unhappy with the Government’s interference during the pandemic.

In terms of the actual Act supporters, there’s a sense in which Act seems to be reacting to the liberal end of the political spectrum trying to change things and shake things up and bring in voices that haven’t been heard before. I think the Act voters sometimes perceive these changes as an attack, and so they decide to defend themselves or even fight perceived violence with violence. They say, ‘we’ve been told to shut up and so know we’re going to tell you to shut up too’. A lot of this seems to be about individual freedom for Act voters. They don’t like anything that feels like people are trying to control them.

How do you think Act voters perceive people like you?

I have people in my life who do vote that way, or at least in that general direction, and I don’t get hostility from them. That’s partially because we have a good relationship and so we can handle disagreement; it might be different with someone who came in and was more absolute in their opinions. There’s possibly an attitude of them thinking I’m a bit naïve in a few things. They might think I’m just not seeing things clearly. I might be a ‘nice’ person, but the world is not the way I think it is. ‘Sure’, they might say, ‘it would be nice if restorative justice worked. But some people are just dangerous or bad and we cannot change this’. So they’d say we need to focus more on protecting everyone else. We need to be a bit more pragmatic.

What are your hopes and fears around New Zealand politics?

I think that MMP has the potential to be really valuable, in the sense that it introduces complex, diverse voices into politics. This doesn’t happen in places like America where you just end up with two sides, and two individuals competing for leadership. Here we’re forced to consider the fact that there’s usually more than two ways of looking at things, and so we need to be a bit more nuanced in the way we think. This is a real strength. My hope is that we move more towards that nuanced kind of conversation, because that’s the only way to find actual wisdom. We need to dive into the complexity rather than thinking there are just positions ‘A’ and ‘B’.

My fear is that I don’t see the world going that way but instead becoming increasing polarised. I see this as more of an ‘American thing’, as their whole system is set up to polarise. To the extent that polarisation is affecting us here, we are losing out on the benefits of the system that we’ve got. On the whole, I think we currently do fairly well in the sense that our main parties are moderate parties. Labour and National, compared to the main parties in the US, are not that far apart from each other on a lot of things. I think that moderation is a really good thing. It’s also helpful because it means that the smaller parties can afford to be a bit further out on the side, to put pressure on and influence the main parties. I think this is a good model because it means we can swing without swinging too far. It wouldn’t be great if we start seeing the major parties being pulled too far out in both directions. But I’m not really seeing that happening much. Instead, we are seeing parties like the Greens and Act getting more popularity, sometimes one more than the other in different seasons. I think that’s better than our core parties swaying in both directions.

The thing I’m most concerned about is how politics affects the way we discuss everything else. If we end up with the kind of politics where everything is an argument, and no can concede points or compromise or see things from different perspectives, than that can translate into how we operate as a society. (Though maybe the causation goes the other way as well?) Either way, I don’t think that’s a healthy way for us to be.

How can we improve our political discourse?

I’d love to see people getting points for conceding! It’s interesting when you think about our most common form of political conversation being the debate format. A debate is a format for entertainment, and it works by each party or politician trying to make the others look bad. You win points on the theoretical scoreboard by batting them down with a big burn. You don’t get points for saying, ‘that was a really reasonable comment’ or for trying hard to understand your opposition. I wonder whether instead of political leaders standing on podiums debating before an audience, we instead had them chatting around a coffee table with snacks, each with the attitude of ‘how can we make things better for New Zealand’. I heard recently that a bunch of young, female politicians from across the spectrum regularly catch up socially to talk about things. That’s powerful. They don’t come on TV and do that, however, because they don’t think that’s what the public wants to see. But imagine if a National MP came on TV and said, ‘here’s my friend who is a Labour MP. We disagree on a lot of things, but I really respect her’. I do think this exists more than we realise, but it would be helpful to see more of it publicly.

One final comment: I think we frequently lose sight of the fact that, for all the flaws of our political system, we get to turn up and vote without fear in a functioning democracy. We shouldn’t take that for granted, as this is not the case in many other places around the world. Despite all the criticisms of our system, we’ve actually got it really good.