Damien Grant: Will National and ACT’s ‘strained relationship’ hurt their election chances?

OPINION: I don’t recall ever having met former MP Richard Prebble; a fact I am sure he is grateful for. Still, he came to mind as I considered the drama unfolding in the Tāmaki electorate.

In the dying weeks of the fourth Labour Government, the then-Minister for State-Owned enterprises reduced the number of State-Owned Enterprises by one. He sold Telecom for $4.2 billion.

There was much howling, but the deed was done and decades of innovation in the communications sector was unleased.

National’s incoming prime minister at the time – Jim Bolger – was not a fan of asset sales and proved the point by accepting a sinecure as chairman of KiwiBank well into his retirement.

Prebble fell out of favour with Labour and was returned to Parliament as the leader of ACT, a position now held by the MP for Epsom. Younger readers may be surprised that ACT’s whakapapa has its origins in the left and the turbulent years of the late 1980s.

The relationship with National has always been, well, strained. Seymour has a joke he likes to beat the natural party of government with; If Labour introduced full communism National would not campaign to abolish it, but merely a promise to manage it better. The quip is funny because there is an aspect of truth to it.

Casual observers may look at the policy prescriptions of National and ACT, notice similarities, and conclude that the two parties share a broadly similar world view. This would be a mistake.

Let’s start with schools. Luxon and his party have a clear idea what teachers should teach, how they should teach and how much time should be spent on teaching. “Teaching the basics brilliantly” is Big Blue’s prescriptive strategy.

ACT is planning to insert a grenade into the bowels of the state education sector, pull the pin and walk quickly away. They want a return to Partnership, or charter schools. They want to give cash to parents to allow them to choose which schools their urchins attend. ACT is proposing a radical restructuring of the education sector that would change the way children are instructed for generations.

ACT plans a form of vouchers for education; giving students and their parents the power to choose how to spend their education dollar and encouraging state schools to become partnership schools; effectively breaking their link to central government.

ACT are proposing other dramatic reforms but the revolution in education is the most exciting. Centre-right voters are being given a choice this election; and the challenge ACT’s deputy leader Brooke van Velden is putting up in Tāmaki brings that into focus.

The incumbent, Simon O’Connor, was elected in 2011. He opposed the End-of-Life choice bill shepherded through Parliament by van Velden prior to her becoming an MP and got into some bother when he welcomed the overturning of Roe v Wade.

Both O’Connor and van Velden are decent people who want the best for their country but they come at politics from very different perspectives. He is a conservative, in the literal sense of that word, that is to conserve the status quo. Perhaps improve upon it, but otherwise leave the prevailing institutions intact.

O’Connor belongs to a tradition where those in authority determine the right thing to do and use the power of the state to enforce it. This is why many, though not all, conservatives are comfortable banning things like abortion, marijuana and assisted suicide.

Van Velden is a social and economic liberal where the right of the individual, though not absolute, is of paramount importance. Even if you believe abortion is immoral, the rights of the women must be considered and the state has no role in such matters.

Where it is possible to have the individual make the decision on a matter that affects them, this is preferable to letting the state decide. Even if the State would make a better choice; that does not justify removing an individual’s agency.

There has been some criticism in polite society about ACT’s decision to take on O’Connor and its assertive approach to pursuing votes from their potential coalition partner. That criticism is misguided; because it comes from those who perceive these two parties as being different colours of the same species.

Let’s not discount that politics is not merely a battle of ideas; it is a battle for power. You cannot win from the negotiation table what you have lost on the battlefield.

Regardless; whether by accident or design, the campaign for Tāmaki is more than one between O’Connor and van Velden, more than a battle over style and name recognition. The two individuals embody the different visions their respective parties.

National wishes to run the State more effectively. ACT wants to re-engineer it to devolve power to the smallest practicable unit and want their reforms to be so drastic that they cannot be unwound by future administrations.

Just as Prebble’s sale of Telecom was both irreversible and unleashed decades of innovation, ACT is seeking to repeat the same achievement in education. If successful this could free generations from the malaise of a broken state sector that has proven itself inept, incompetent and unresponsive to the needs of this nation’s children.

As Prebble wrote in his 1996 book, I’ve Been Thinking: “It is my belief that the education system is organised according to the needs of teachers and administrators, not the children they teach. It’s the same principal in action that organised the railways, but the damage done here is far greater than losing tractors and wagons.”

ACT’s reforms are unlikely to be fully implemented if National retains the power to set the agenda in the post-election negotiations. So, the choice for centre-right voters is clear.

If you wish to see dysfunctional state sectors managed marginally better, National is the party for you. If you wish to reform the state sector the way Prebble reformed Telecom, perhaps consider supporting ACT.