Simon Cunliffe considers Don Brash's 'Dear John' letter.
Loving you isn't the right thing to do
How can I ever change things that I feel?
If I could, maybe I'd give you my world
How can I, when you won't take it from me?
You can go your own way, go your own way ...
- Go Your Own Way, Fleetwood Mac
As "Dear John" letters go, this one was a humdinger. Not content merely to say "it's over", the missive resonated with a love's-labours-lost intonation. It felt compelled to traverse the depths of betrayal with its recriminatory evisceration of broken promises, and made free with accusations of unrequited intent. It cited irreconcilable differences for the split.
But for all that it was a curiously unemotional affair. So much so that in the end one had to wonder whether its author's heart was really in it.
Tomorrow is Budget day.
Conventional wisdom has it an election-year Budget sets the agenda for the forthcoming polls. But those who saw the full-page advertisement in certain newspapers, or who otherwise read the widely distributed and printed letter from Don Brash to John Key, could be forgiven for imagining campaigning had already started.
Certainly, the spending already has - when was the last time a political party forked out for a full-page advertisement in a national newspaper? - and the none-too-subtle subtext is that Act New Zealand is not short of a penny or two to get its message across.
"Dear John, It was with a very heavy heart that I felt obliged to resign my membership of the National Party and seek the leadership of the Act Party," begins Dr Brash, giving Mr Key and his party a good public kicking on his way out the door.
The Government, says Dr Brash, has continued "Labour's wasteful spending" and even trumped it; it has, he says, stopped young people from working by voting against a Bill bringing back youth rates; it changed its position on the emissions trading scheme; it is ignoring "the reality on superannuation"; it has widened the transtasman wage gap rather than narrowed it. National, Dr Brash says, has abandoned its commitment to "equal citizenship"; and it is running "New Zealand for our opponents".
None of this, the good doctor admonishes, is the medicine National supporters voted for.
On the face of it, this is a brutal attack by one erstwhile political ally on another. As some of the headlines have put it, "Who needs enemies when you have friends like this?"
I, however, beg to differ. For two reasons.
The first, and this is accepted wisdom, is that under MMP the nature of coalition government is such that the brand of the minor parties invariably gets cannibalised by that of the larger.
The smaller parties in coalition or confidence-and-supply cahoots with the largest governing party simply lose their mojo, regardless of achievements in power.
Dr Brash's "Dear John" letter is a clever and highly effective way - riding on the back of the publicity he received over the leadership coup which saw Rodney Hide deposed - to differentiate and brand afresh Act New Zealand.
The second reason is not so obvious: the entire "Dear John" conceit is a back-handed appeal to the middle ground of politics.
Ostensibly a hard-hitting critique of Mr Key and his Government's failure to deliver on so-called core National Party policies, every clause is in fact an appeal to middle-of-the-road swing voters, be they citizens who have in the past cast their ballots for Labour, the Greens, New Zealand First or the Maori Party.
It is framed in such a way as to highlight how Mr Key and his team have delivered policies construed as belonging to these other parties, thus strengthening its claim for the centre, while Act renews its claim further to the Right.
Presumably deliberately, it obfuscates some of the policies that the National-Act-Maori Party Government has delivered: harsher penal policies and privatising some prisons; the introduction of divisive educational platforms such as national standards; the hobbling of ACC; the demolition of public service television; the instigation of radical welfare revisionism; the 90-day rule in employment relations; and so on. But then most core National and Act voters already know this and applaud it.
Dr Brash's clever "Dear John" letter was not penned in a fit of pique. It was constructed very deliberately and precisely for consumption by the centre.
In fact it would come as no great shock if one was to learn that Mr Key's back-room strategists actually helped to compose it.
- Simon Cunliffe is deputy editor (news) at the Otago Daily Times.
