This yawnfest of an election is cause for national celebration. May the dullest Chris win – David Cohen
One of my favourite English essayists, Hilaire Belloc, held that “any subject can be made interesting, and therefore any subject can be made boring”. Politics is no exception. Our local variety has produced its share of Olympic-standard bores, some of whom have decent claims to the title of bore laureate.
But boring politicians are one thing; the reassuring predictability of a stable political system is another. The palpable lack of electricity in the campaign that ends today ought to be a cause for national celebration.
Working in Britain over the course of the election season, I’ve been watching similar battles rage elsewhere. By comparison, New Zealand’s utter lack of excitement looks not merely tolerable but delicious.
The campaign has been widely panned as the “most dull election campaign in recent history”, in the words of one local pundit echoing a sentiment now doing the rounds. I reckon that’s excellent. In a country as stable as New Zealand, an election should never feel like a drag race along Skippers Canyon Rd near Queenstown – a matter of life and death.
We are choosing a governing arrangement for the next three years, led by one of the major parties and, presumably, a chin-stroking man named Chris.
Nothing more, nothing less.
If we make a mistake this weekend, we can correct it three years down the track. She’ll be right, eh? The country won’t fall to pieces in the meantime, even if the various “overhang” strategies end up exploding in everyone’s faces. That confidence is one of the privileges of living in a long-established democracy. Electoral boredom is not a failure of politics; it is one of its most precious dividends.
So, too, is the knowledge that the country is not looking for a moral tutor as its next Prime Minister, a role model for our kids, or even a coalition that will – in the blubbery language of today’s commentary – “get the country moving”.
Listen. Governments do not ultimately get economies moving, and who would want to live in a nation where they could? There may be plenty of good reasons to think a centre-right or centre-left coalition will be better or worse at holding the fort until 2029. Under either, however, the nation will not be at existential risk. The campaign just gone hasn’t even thrown up any real hate figures, since all but a couple of the various leaders seem like reasonably decent plodders who genuinely want the best for the country.
Now consider the political excitement elsewhere: in countries holding elections, or enduring prolonged upheaval, where the stakes feel higher because the institutions themselves appear less settled.
Start with the United States, whose mid-term elections this week took place amid an intensifying struggle over the limits of presidential power, and where the rival halves of the nation increasingly inhabit different universes. The lodestar of the latest contest, of course, was Donald Trump. Whatever one thinks of the sitting President, he is easily the most “exciting” man to have led the republic in modern times: a leader whose firecracker of a gift for commanding attention is matched only by the chaos he leaves in his wake.
Or consider Britain. Never a dull moment. Here, the old two-party order is splintering after a prolonged period of unbelievably sluggish economic news, the lingering aftermath of Brexit, revolving-door leadership and an immigration crisis that will not be assuaged even by the luxuriant eyebrows of the country’s newest Prime Minister.
One of the reasons British politics could hardly be more colourful is because voters can no longer be certain which parties will survive until next year, let alone govern. Talk about thrilling! Talk about Yeats: everywhere, things are falling apart, the centre no longer holds, and mere anarchy is loosed on the electorate. As it has been across the waters in recent weeks in ever-colourful, doomed France – another hapless nation whose exciting woes hardly need amplification.
Or, heaven help us, Israel, a place even its harshest critics would never call lethargic. The country lives under the constant shadow of wars – and rumours of wars. And, as last week’s apocalyptic election suggested, one of the most unstable governments imaginable. Israel makes much of being a functioning democracy, which is true as far as it goes within its recognised borders, but who else would want this particular brand?
Possibly the best of the Israeli bunch, at least for present purposes, is Yair Lapid, a television journalist turned politician and the last Prime Minister to serve other than Benjamin Netanyahu. Not only is he surprisingly tedious by local standards, he boasts a family background in which dullness was positively extolled.
Lapid’s late father, the politician and sometime writer Tommy Lapid, penned a poem celebrating the Kiwis for our national good fortune. To Live in New Zealand casts an envious eye on a part of the world where, he marvelled, people can get by watching “the farmer shearing his white sheep” without worrying about conflicts and conscriptions.
“Is it fair that New Zealanders die from boredom?” the poem asks wistfully.
Is it fair? Yes, it jolly well is. There are far worse things to die of, especially in politics. So here’s to another yawnfest of an election outcome tomorrow night – and may the dullest Chris win.
David Cohen is a Wellington-based journalist and author.
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