Janet Wilson: Ditch the rancour, we need grown-up political debate

Janet Wilson is a freelance journalist who has also worked in communications, including with the National Party in 2020. She is a regular contributor to Stuff.

OPINION: If trust is the glue that holds us together as a functioning society, then the loss of that trust can be graphically charted between the first Covid lockdown and the parliamentary protest.

On March 23, 2020, then Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s first speech from the Podium of Truth, announcing the first lockdown, became a rallying cry that united us as a nation as we hunkered down together. Aotearoa New Zealand was hailed worldwide as the-little-country-that-could.

Two short but traumatic years later, on March 2, 2022, that trust – in ourselves, in the institutions that represent our values – shattered like a broken splintered mirror as protesters, marginalised and angry, set fire to Parliament’s playground. Scientists say this lack of trust, what they call social cohesion, is becoming increasingly critical, and more research is needed to prevent it eroding further.

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What’s caused this splintering is not only Covid-19, they say, but also the rise of social media, “the relatively ungoverned virtual world”, climate change and artificial intelligence.

New Zealand’s democratic decline is outlined in a new report from the Auckland University think-tank Koi Tū: The Centre for Informed Futures, called Addressing the challenges to social cohesion.

An election campaign can exacerbate that polarisation, one of the report’s authors maintains. Sir Peter Gluckman, president of the International Science Council, says that how election issues are conducted can further divide society.

A slew of headlines this week confirms that polarisation. Wednesday’s Stats NZ May food price index, down nominally for the previous month but still staggering at 12.1%, told us what we already knew.

Adding to that came Thursday’s news that the country was in a “technical” recession, which was mere semantics if you’re a mortgage prisoner saddled with rising mortgage rates on a property that’s worth less than your loan. Little wonder, then, that inflation/cost of living remains the No 1 concern in this month’s Ipsos New Zealand Issues Monitor.

Little wonder, too, that crime/law and order is second on that list, when a gang of bikies can roll into Ōpōtiki, shutting its schools down for a week after the murder of gang boss Steven Taiatini ahead of the funeral. Cue the increasingly predictable political response that falls prey to what the Koi Tū report calls ‘’affective polarisation’, where values are “increasingly replaced by emotion as the basis of political and civic action”.

National Party leader Christopher Luxon took to Facebook to complain that a town had been overtaken by a gang. “And Chris Hipkins’ response? It’s not his job to deal with crime”, before he resorted to the well-worn narrative that National would get tough on crime and “restore law and order”.

Boring it may be for those seeking more considered discourse from political leaders but party apparatchiks will point to the Ipsos NZ Issues Monitor that sees National as the preferred party to handle law and order.

But it wasn’t just the politicians adding to the debate – or rather lack of it this week – broadcast media were doing their bit too. 1News got a “gotcha” moment, or what passes for one these days, when it caught Luxon on microphone describing the country as “a very negative, wet, whiny, inward-looking country” and “we have to get our mojo back”.

Once again Luxon’s media interaction for the rest of the week was devoted to those comments rather than to his party’s agriculture policy, but in that unguarded moment he elucidated what many believe. A fact captured by Labour’s own pollsters Talbot-Mills in its April 27-May 3 testing where 40% believed the country was moving in the right direction, while 52% believed it was travelling in the wrong one.

How can this country’s politicians ensure that our democracy remains effective and resilient? The report’s authors say it comes down to vertical trust, between the government, its institutions and the governed, and horizontal trust, those of us from different backgrounds who need that trust to co-operate.

Horizontal trust means we must return to understanding ourselves, despite our differences, to “tackling disinformation and returning civility to the public square”.

But the report suggests that while we pride ourselves on our vertical trust, “that can, on occasions translate to complacency”. What’s needed to counteract that is more transparency, not less. Which means greater checks and balances when it comes to the Official Information Act and the offices of the Ombudsman and Auditor-General.

Because, while politicians now strut and preen on the national stage in campaign mode, it’s how they behave between elections that’s of most concern. Where real debate is squashed in favour of the side-show of Question Time, where consultation occurs once a decision has been made and is only weeks long, where select committees rubber-stamp policy rather than challenge it.

To create that cohesiveness in our political system we need more intelligent debate and compromise without rancour instead of what we’re getting now – less democratic, more petty, scrappy politics.

Correction: The university think-tank report referred to in this article has been updated with the correct link and title. Story amended June 17, 8.51am.