Ruminator: Rape & NZ culture

I expanded the first chunk of that last post into a longer piece for the Ruminator: Rape is easy here.

It’s another example of how I’m using the existence of the Ruminator as a prompt and motivator for a different style of writing, with a different set of goals. (e.g. I write here often for myself, whereas there I often write to whatever audience I imagine.) I’m very pleased to be a contributor to the Ruminator and intend to keep sending them content.

The Ruminator is also fundraising. In theory “pay our writers” is part of the goal but I’ll just be happy if it covers the ongoing costs of hosting and registration. If you like what the Ruminator is doing, you might want to send a few virtual coins its way…

The racism in the Trayvon case is here:

The justification [of self-defense]… is not available to a person who… initially provokes the use of force against himself or herself, unless… Such force is so great that the person reasonably believes that he or she is in imminent danger of death or great bodily harm….

There’s the racism. Right there.

It all hinges on that “reasonable belief”. In the culture of racial anxiety and safety paranoia that dominates certain swathes of the USA, it is much easier for a jury to accept that a white man reasonably believes he is in such danger from a black man, than the reverse.

(Note that the accused doesn’t need to be a racist for this to have an effect. Nor does the judge, nor the prosecution or defence, nor the jury.)
(Yes, Zimmerman wasn’t white. Still counts.)
(Yes, the legislation says that the basis of the belief must be the degree of force. Still counts. A punch from a black man is straight-up more terrifying than a punch from a white man.)
(The blockquote above is my selective quoting from the relevant Florida legislation, as excerpted by Ta-Nehisi Coates – read his post too.)

Ruminator: Pink vs Blue

Yesterday turned out to be an interesting day. There was winning at basketball, which happens rarely enough these days that it’s a happy moment indeed. There was completing the serialisation of “in move”, my teenage-boys-in-the-Hutt novel, about which more soon (I need to get the ebook version prepared for release). There was getting a heat pump installed, hurrah for that. But the big thing was Pink vs Blue.

Pink vs Blue was a post I wrote over at The Ruminator. It’s about how being a dad to a little girl has given me some new avenues for thinking about the way our culture codes and scripts gender in a really limiting way. I spent a while scooping together lots of bits and pieces I’d been thinking and feeling for a while, and lined them up in what I hoped was an illuminating way.

As usual with this sort of stuff, the writing of it is also the thinking about it – I look for turns of phrase or metaphors or rhetorical flourishes that feel like they help me understand. Like if I can just line up the words in the right way, I’ll unlock some hidden secret. Sometimes it does feel like that.

Anyway, I’m pretty proud of this post, because it’s very personal and also very general, and I tried hard to get it right. It’s taken off in a moderate sort of way, lots of shares by people I’ve never heard of. Easily the most widely circulated thing I’ve ever written (excepting that time I cut and pasted a few Wikileaks tweets and added the words “this is interesting” and it went crazy on Reddit).

You can find it here. I hope you’ll have a read, and if you are so moved, do pass it on to anyone else who might be interested.

Marriage Equality!

Third reading passed! We watched the NZ Parliament TV as MPs gave speeches, mostly powerfully and emotionally supportive, and we mocked the elevator music as the votes were cast, and then we cheered as the count came back. And I personally cheered as the whole Parliament & gallery broke into song, Pokarekare Ana…

While on the other side of the world, Margaret Thatcher’s funeral.

Huge congratulations to all my friends whose lives just changed in a tangible way. It’s about bloody time. I kiss you all. Yay!

Guest Post: Love Matters

It’s second vote day for the Marriage Equality Bill, & an old friend of mine has a few thoughts about that. The video Craig and his husband Marcel made, at the bottom of the post, is worth watching and sharing. Tell your elected representatives that love matters!

In the past I could not relate the idea of being gay to pride. I remember seeing gay pride campaigns and not understanding the connection between being gay and pride. I no more felt proud being a Kiwi or Pakeha or gay or having blue eyes for that matter. They are all simply ways of describing the attributes of who I am, they weren’t something I had earned, and therefore there was no way to be proud of them.

Today I have a better sense of what pride means. It’s not pride at what I’ve accomplished. It’s pride that I am entitled to and should be given the same respect as everyone else. It’s as simple as this: everyone is entitled to be respected for who they are and treated the same under the law. Some call it pride. I call it respect and civility.

Discrimination is a form of cancer in society. It causes people to feel disenfranchised and isolated, and reinforces ill-treatment of the target group. In my opinion, this prevents a society from ever reaching its full potential.

I know first hand what it was like to be bullied…relentlessly for being gay, and laws that discriminate against gay people indirectly and implicitly reinforce this behaviour. Young LGBT suicides are an absolute tragedy, as are any youth suicides. A society built on acceptance and respect instead of fear and discrimination nurtures and fosters our youth. We owe it to them. We owe it to ourselves.

We have been together now for 15 years, and I look forward to the day when the most interesting thing about that is not the fact we are a same-sex couple, but how it is that he has put up with me for this long.

I’m looking forward to the next 15 years, but this time being your NZ husband.

P.s. No Winston Peters, human rights are not a question of popular vote. Human rights are a question of entitlement and respect. Same-sex marriage is not impinging on the human rights of any other section of society and your job as an elected representative is to protect human rights, not to deflect attention away from the real point of the discussion: State-endorsed discrimination. Tsk tsk.

However, you know what? Even if it came to a popular vote, I have confidence Kiwis would support it.

Thanks Craig!

BAT: Why they do it

I think I’ve cracked it.

A few days ago I made a lengthy post about how the British American Tobacco “agree disagree” marketing campaign made no sense to me at all, at all, at all. Since then BAT has launched a third phase of the campaign, which is even weirder and less likely to be convincing and what the hell what the hell didgeridoo noise what the hell.

And as I thought about that and tried, again, to work out what on earth the advertising company & BAT think they’re doing, suddenly I came up with an explanation that makes sense to me. It might not be the truth, but at least it puts a comprehensible motive behind this apparently nonsensical marketing.

Here goes: they’re trying to rebrand the tobacco industry.

The advertisements to the mass NZ public, the petition, the Twitter stream, the stunted website – none of these are trying to convince people of the merits of the plain packaging case. That’s what the campaign claims to be about, but it just ain’t true. They know the NZ public isn’t going to take up pitchforks and demand plain packaging be tossed aside. A campaign to actually get the public behind you looks more like the one they ran in Australia, where it was all about your tax dollars being misspent and your neighbourhoods falling into ruin.

Nope. The purpose here is bigger. Consider the detail of this campaign:

  • the name, “agree disagree” which suggests a willingness to engage and consider
  • the upfront admission that smoking is harmful (this must be the largest sum of money ever spent by a tobacco company to frontload the message that smoking is bad for you)
  • the technical nature of the arguments raised (IP ownership, international trade implications, legislative comparability between NZ and Australia)
  • the “sophisticated” tone taken – the word “CREATE” which is firmly the symbolic territory of the liberal arts; the wine industry, or more pointedly, bottles of wine which is still the drink of the social elite
  • the overall tone of restraint in voiceover, writing, general messaging – consider also the negative space where a more screechy, nasty campaign might be
  • the sheer size of the campaign, which suggests that this is an issue that genuinely matters to them

Look at what comes through: we are considered, honest, clever, sophisticated, restrained, sincere.
Or: we are not your daddy’s tobacco industry.

They’re trying to position themselves as reasonable actors. This is the *exact opposite* of what they were doing in Australia, which was hitting very hard all the notes that would push for public outrage without worrying about how it made them look. That didn’t work.

So, where’s the value in this kind of rebranding? If they do it right, it will make a difference to their lobbying environment. The broad push will hit a lot of people, and they’ll forget the technical detail of what’s up but they will remember this: “it sounds to me like those tobacco companies are actually being pretty sensible”. The decisionmakers and politicians will get this message from the community, as well as being caught up in the saturation marketing themselves.

That means, when a BAT rep makes a phone call to a business lobby group and tries to get them to carry water on their behalf, the person on the other end is more likely to agree.

It means when Campbell Live has a face-to-face on the issue between a Green MP and a BAT rep, the public give the tobacco person a better hearing and response.

And it means, when a BAT representative stands up at Select Committee to talk through why this is a bad idea, the people on the committee are better disposed to listen.

All of this counts. All of this makes a difference. It gives them a better shot at keeping plain packaging out of NZ, and that’s the big prize. That’s why they’re doing this.

I like this explanation. It brings all the weirdness into a single line that pushes hard towards the only result that matters to BAT. It justifies the amount of money spent and explains why none of the elements do what they claim to be doing.

There’s one sticking point: as I’ve noted, the three technical arguments made are actually not very convincing at all. How does that help them? Well, it doesn’t help them, but it also doesn’t invalidate this explanation. You see, the reason the arguments seem meritless is because *the arguments are meritless*. They don’t have stronger ones to call on. It’s a bluff, but not the obvious kind (“these are great arguments, honest!”). No, the bluff is to argue in the style of a considered, sensible person, so people conclude you actually are a considered, sensible person.

BAT are taking a gamble, and if I’m reading it right then it is indeed smart and perhaps it’s their only shot left. With that all said: I still don’t think it’s going to work. I think plain packaging is going to happen here. Our society turned against smoking years ago, and this is just another way to show that.

(That petition I was puzzled about is still hard to read, but I’d guess it’s for two purposes, private lobbying and message refinement. In meetings they can say “We sent people out to talk to ordinary folks. They got X many signatures in only Y days, and told us A, B and C. Obviously there’s no appetite for this change.” At the same time, they can improve the way they talk about the issues based on feedback from their people on the ground.)

Big Tobacco: why you do this?

I’ve mentioned previously the Agree/Disagree campaign that has been running prominently in NZ media for the last month. It has been hard to miss, with many television spots in prime time every day, full page ads in newspapers, and radio placements too. The spend is enormous. The initial stated amount of “hundreds of thousands of dollars” is, a month later, clearly revealed as something of an understatement. (The equivalent campaign in Oz spent $4.5 million.)

The campaign, by British American Tobacco, is in opposition to government moves towards mandatory plain packaging of cigarettes. It argues that plain packaging is bad because it impinges on corporate right to use the brands they have carefully developed; and it hurts us on international trade, making us vulnerable to legal challenges for example. They also state that plain packaging just won’t make a difference. (That last point appears to be quite wrong; the science is developing towards a clear signal that plain packaging reduces smoking rates.)

The website itself is quite small and uninteresting (and a close match to the Aussie version). It has a statement of the argument, and reproduces their print, TV and radio ads. That’s it. Missing: any call to action, at all. Anyone who responds to these ads and actually visits the site will find a few bullet points and nothing else of interest.

After a month of this with no end in sight, the mystery of what BAT are trying to achieve remains unsolved. Why are they spending so much money, time, and brand capital on this campaign? As another blogger has put it, what is the point of all this?

It isn’t to persuade the public to accept their argument. This is unconvincing on two levels. First, it just isn’t going to work. Public support is never going to muster behind support for tobacco marketing (and branding is marketing, make no mistake on that) or the details of international trade. (If you want to get the massed public behind you, you need a better hook than this. Compare the recent Australia “nanny state” campaign.) Second, even if you do persaude the public – so what? How does that get you what you want? This matter isn’t going to referendum. Are you hoping all your new supporters spontaneously decide to lobby government on your behalf? That’s a ridiculous notion.

In fact, this whole campaign is so poorly conceived that it’s actively turning smokers against BAT.

So you have the deeply weird spectacle of an enormous, expensive public persuasion campaign that is not actually interested in persuading the public.

A further wrinkle has appeared since: BAT have hired a small team of people to go around NZ gathering signatures and discussing the plain packaging issue. They were out in Wgtn recently and a few of my friends were approached to sign a petition against plain packaging. What petition is this? Your guess is as good as mine. But a small team being flown around the country for a month aren’t going to get enough names to make much of an impact on anything. If the petition mattered, it would be online as well, wouldn’t it? So add to the weirdness above: a petition that has no interest in actually collecting signatures.

Clearly something isn’t what it seems here.

What else is at work? Chris Trotter suggests the spend isn’t aimed at the public directly, but at editors and columnists who are influenced by the dollars coming their way. That could be part of the mix, because getting editors and columnists on-side is certainly a way to influence political action in NZ. I find the notion that this is the core purpose of the exercise hugely unconvincing. (“Here’s the plan: we spend loadsamoney advertising our argument, and hope some influential columnists decide that’s a good reason to take up our cause, know what I mean?” “But can’t we just get pretty much the same result by taking out a few small ads and sending a personalised letter to the columnists who are inclined to support our point?”)

Look again at their core argument. IP issues? International trade concerns? These issues are not addressed with public marketing campaigns. They are pursued through direct lobbying to government, submissions to select committee, and corridor conversations with influential people.

And yet a big national campaign is what we have. What are they up to?

Here’s another explanation: BAT have gone mad. No, seriously. They are so terrified by the ongoing shift in public opinion that will destroy their business sooner rather than later that they are running around like headless chooks, not talking to each other, throwing any random thing they can at the wall and hoping to somehow connect with a hidden reset switch. It’s a satisfying mental image, but probably unwise to give it any credence…

Okay, looking at what they’re actually doing isn’t giving me any clear picture. How about starting from the other end – what should we expect them to be doing? Obviously, this is important to BAT and other tobacco companies. They are, presumably, terrified of a public-health domino effect. Australia has fallen, and we are primed to go next. Other smoking changes swept the world with great rapidity, e.g. smokefree restaurants and bars. They have to fight this one here, before it gets out of hand. They don’t have many options in how to fight, really. They can directly pressure decisionmakers (which is how things have traditionally been done) and they can try and keep public opinion on side so there is no appetite for change. Can this gigantic mess of a campaign really be their best shot at public opinion?

Comparing agree/disagree to BAT’s Aussie campaign is interesting. The framing is completely different. It’s all: “Will plain packaging cost the taxpayers billions? Will it make tobacco cheaper? Where’s the proof?” Here, incredibly, the ads all front up with “we accept smoking is harmful” and talk about fairness and debate on technical issues. It’s a fascinating switch-up by BAT and/or BAT’s creative agency G2 Sydney (who I presume did the Aussie version too). Some possible reasons: the Aussie version really, really didn’t work; the temperature of the NZ market was so different they felt a completely different angle was needed; they’re trying out a new strategy that might cross borders more effectively; they’ve adjusted their behind-the-scenes lobbying approach and wanted their public strategy to align with that; some new manager came into a senior role and wanted to stamp his authority on things by making a change. All of these are unedifying, and impossible to test or verify based on what we can see from the outside.

So where does all this leave us? I wish I knew. I’m no closer to understanding what on earth BAT think they’re doing. One thing is certain: this public campaign is not the whole iceberg. There will be a whole huge pile of hidden work going on – lobbying politicians will just be the start of it. (Keith Ng covered some BAT lobbying action last year.) And if this enormous public campaign is just to support that, just to provide a few anecdotes and the thin impression of public support to give lobbyists just that bit of extra edge on influencing policymakers? If that’s the case, be very afraid, because that suggests the war chest big tobacco has to call upon is much, much bigger than I would like.

One other thing. I would not be surprised if the online discussion around this issue was being infiltrated by paid fake commenters pushing the BAT line. The “discuss this!” line is being pushed hard (although, notably, not on the campaign’s own forum) and buying some sock puppets is a cheap way to get some real push on your messaging. It’d be nice if sysadmins at media sites kept an eye out for this, although it ain’t hard to make it pretty much invisible.

Insights from readers most welcome, because I am mystified by this whole thing.

Safety & exclusion at the Dowse

The Dowse Art Museum here in controversial Lower Hutt is hosting an exhibition with a video component that only women will be allowed to view. The video shows Muslim women getting ready for a wedding. Limiting views to women is a condition of display, in accordance with the wishes of the subjects.

This has got people talking, unsurprisingly, but most of what is being said is dumb.*

As far as I can tell, sitting under this issue are two contrary positions, and I don’t think they’re self-evident. Here’s my take on them:

“A public gallery must not share an artwork if some people will be excluded from seeing it.”
vs.
“A public gallery can share an artwork even if some people must be excluded from seeing it in order for the subjects to feel safe.”

Now, the way I’ve written that second position is important. I think most people who align with the first position think they’re arguing against something different, namely this: “A public gallery can share an artwork even if some people must be excluded from seeing it because another culture says so.”

This is a spectacularly unhelpful framing, for all sorts of reasons, but mostly because it treats culture difference as the final word. Their culture is just different to ours, and in this case, it’s offensively different! But culture isn’t the end of the story, it’s just the beginning. Look under the hood, and you find that cultural differences are almost always just different expressions of values that are shared across cultures. Here, it’s about safety, and about how people in different cultures feel safe. In the culture shown in this video display, safety is heavily gendered in a way it isn’t here.

If you accept my framing that talks about safety, then you have a discussion on your hands, a proper ethical conundrum. Does safety justify exclusion? Can exclusion ever be justified? It would be nice to have that discussion. I see no signs of it so far, though.

My personal view right now? I have to say it doesn’t bother me. Here’s why:

I want New Zealand to be a multicultural society, and that means one that accepts cultural practice that is not consonant with our own expectations. If we want to welcome people from other cultures, then we have to give them space on our turf to do things their way. It’s that simple.

(What’s not simple is figuring out exactly how far that goes. FGM is not to be blithely welcomed in my multicultural NZ, for example. Where to draw a line has to be carefully, probably painfully, argued out over generations; but the starting point and the principle is nonetheless clear.)

So I’m totally cool with an art gallery following an other-culture’s ideas, including a public-funded gallery as a small part of its ongoing work. Violating my cultural norms for a short time seems like a small price to pay to give space for, and access to, another culture.

And yes, the norm here is involves gendered discrimination. The idea of gender equality is awesome when it’s used to attack the concentration of social power in men. But that just doesn’t apply here; this is about protecting the social power of women. I think I support this inequality for the exact same reasons I support equality in the vast majority of contexts.

Also: there’s an idea that allowing this exclusion weakens the general principle of equality in our society. I don’t buy it. Maybe someone could convince me, but I just don’t see how you can get there from here.

Also 2: yes, there might be legal issues – if this is non-compliant with Human Rights legislation, then it’s gotta go, because that’s the law. But it’ll seem to me like an exercise of law that isn’t warranted, a false positive on the spirit of the legislation.

That’s where I’m sitting right now. Totally open to being pushed or pulled around on this, should a sober exploration of this ethical situation ever eventuate. Ha ha.

* Really dumb. There’s a lot of talk about political correctness, obscenity, Sharia law, thin edges of wedges, and numerous tangential comments on Maoris and playdough. The complainant getting media is a perfect example of this type, and I think it’s obvious his opposition is bound up with some unpleasant stereotypes and fears.

Here is my Kony post

I didn’t do a Friday linky because I was mad busy & decided that making sense of Kony was a better use of the time I had. Now I share! Because the internet is crying out for one more opinion about Kony! HAPPY TO HALP!

So, you will have not missed that last week the social medias were alight with Kony2012, a viral campaign concerning bringing an African bad guy to justice. It got so big, so fast, that it became real news. Even the 6pm bulletin here in little old NyewZillund carried quite a long story on the phenomenon!

The campaign is by an outfit called Invisible Children and centred on a video that explained who Kony is. It also made clear that sharing the video will help bring Kony to justice. I watched the video. So here are some things:

(1) Apparently a video can go viral even when it is 29 minutes long. This is flat-out incredible. All those grumpy old self-important men who write columns and books about how the internet is the end of concentrated attention can choke on that.

(2) The video is plainly the work of a self-important white male American. I kept wanting him to shut up. Likewise the endless images of red-shirted activists sticking up posters and running around and hugging black people. (But see note 1, below)

(3) But hey, there seems to be a powerful core there. Kony is plainly a bad dude. It is worth knowing about that, and worth fixing that, if we can, right?

Well, sort of. It gets complicated pretty fast. There have been many, many replies to the Kony video and wider campaign, and they come from all directions and focus on dozens of different issues. Sifting through the mess, I’ve fixed on one thing that, in my opinion, a chap or chap-ette should bear in mind when considering Kony2012:
If a step of your plan for justice is “influence the Pentagon to deploy the U.S. military into a foreign country”, then you better be damn sure you know what you’re doing.

As is obvious – I don’t have any confidence that Invisible Children have thought this through. Their promotional material certainly doesn’t indicate any thinking AT ALL about this type of issue, which strikes me as straight-up crazy. The military issue is the big one, to me, because it means even the raising awareness idea at the heart of the campaign, the laudable impulse we have to build a chorus of voices against injustice, becomes problematic as it is tied into the projection of U.S. military force.

Here’s some of the discussion that led me to focus on this issue:
The Justice in Conflict blog breaks down the problems with military intervention as a Kony “solution”. See also a later defence of this post, and a great Salon article by the blog author: Kony2012 – the danger of simplicity

See also a different, complementary take on the dangers of military intervention, also in Salon.

And: “The idea that popular opinion can be leveraged with viral marketing to induce foreign military intervention is really, really dangerous.” – those extremist peaceniks at, er, the Kings College London Department of War Studies.

So there’s that. (See also note 2.) It’s why I’m not keen on this campaign.

And with that comment this post could end, but I have loads more tabs open, so I’ll carry on. Because there are many other concerns about Invisible Children. They have been criticised for questionable accounts & poor value as a charity (contested), and for framing the Kony problem as a white man’s burden. (Note, at the end of the article, the tweets by Teju Cole who is my new favourite Twitter follow.) (Also, more on the white savior complex.)

Two big critical themes seem to be more prominent than others. (Certainly more prominent than the concerns over military intervention that I see as the biggest problem.)

One is oversimplification. It’s a complex situation and the video and campaign paint it as a simple one. It is dangerous to oversimplify a complex situation, say the Warscapes crew. Or, more snarkily:
“On March 6, hundreds of people told me to take thirty minutes out of my evening to watch Invisible Children’s Kony documentary. If, on March 7, you’re not taking thirty minutes out of your evening to read the International Crisis Group’s November 2011 report on the way forward for stabilization and conflict resolution in LRA-affected areas, you’re not doing your job correctly.” – from the blog Securing Rights, which is actually a lot more sympathetic to Invisible Children than many voices, see their fascinating response to discussion.

The other is the absence of Ugandan and other African voices. The value they bring to the table is self-evident, and the fact that I’ve got this far without addressing their absence shows that I’m embedded in my white western perspectives too. BoingBoing did the work of pulling a whole bunch of good stuff together. This link is worth clickering.

Right. That’s enough of Kony2012. I’m personally more interested in Syria, showing both my personal as well as geopolitical biases. I would be very interested to hear from other people about Kony – not about whether you agree with me or not (although yes I am interested in that also), but rather how you’ve navigated the whole Kony webstorm. Did you ignore it? Watch the video and leave it there? Get into the arguments? I’m curious how we navigate controversy and information these days.

——————

Note 1: Being self-important isn’t necessarily a bad thing if you’re in the activism game. A certain douchebagginess can certainly help get things done. I just won’t like you very much.

Note 2: The viral video not only has the Pentagon as the heroes, but its feature U.S. politician, leading the charge on this issue, is none other than infamous climate-denial doofbrain Sen Jim Inhofe. Check out his other greatest hits. My favourite: “In 2006, Inhofe was one of only nine senators to vote against the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 which prohibits “cruel, inhuman or degrading” treatment of individuals in U.S. Government custody.” AWESOME ALLY FOR YOUR SOCIAL JUSTICE CAMPAIGN DOODZ.

Good for the Greens

Three years ago, I was disillusioned about the low % of votes cast for the Green party, despite what I thought was a perfect set of conditions for them to thrive. “Is 7% as high as it’s ever going to get? Will the Green party always be this small?”

Turns out the people in the comments who said, nope, it can go bigger – they were right. The Green vote is sitting around 11% this time around.

It’s a marvellous result for them, even if it sits in the context of an election result that doesn’t give much to celebrate – very low turnout, a savage defeat for the main opposition Labour party, key losses for the left in almost every close electorate contest, and (most galling) the ridiculous spectacle of consummate politician (and political opportunist) Winston Peters riding in at the last moment and polling nearly 7% in doing so.

It’s a clear success for the new approach taken by the Greens, a careful don’t-scare-the-horses, friendlier-to-business model that has drawn a lot of criticism from their base. Ultimately I’m comfortable with this; given the failure of the big parties to engage with urgent environmental problems, the Greens need to be a party of influence, and if they have to sell some of their soul to get there then that seems like a political calculation they need to make.

A less-scary Green party also opens up space on the left for a true social justice party to come in and be vocal about those causes. The Mana party is the first shot at this, but I’m not yet confident it can hold together under the strain of the big personalities at its core; only winning one seat might be a blessing for the longer game.

Anyway. The country voted John Key back into power, despite polls showing they don’t really like his policies and don’t really know much about the rest of his party. That’s not a great endorsement for the NZ version of democracy, I guess.

Gonna be a tough three years.

(I also predicted “Many inside the Nats are eager to get on with their 90s-era project while they have their hands on the tiller. Expect big battles inside the National party as the ideologues take on the pragmatists.” – and the view from the outside is that I was wrong about that. There might be battles inside the party but almost nothing has leaked out into public view, it’s all a united front behind that nice Mr Keys. Anyway, with a second term won while openly campaigning on asset sales and welfare reform, the pragmatists and ideologues now find themselves happily in alignment. The waiting game has worked out beautifully for them.)