Brian Easton says winning office is not the same as achieving change

This is a re-post of an article originally published on pundit.co.nz. It is here with permission.

A recent Economist columnist divided politicians and their political advisers into either ‘jock wankers’ or ‘nerd wankers’. It’s a distinction which I use here, but with the less pejorative ‘politicos’ and ‘policy wonks’.

In opposition, the politicos are primarily concerned with getting their party elected; in government their concern is maintaining party support to get the government reelected. The Economist recalls ‘a period of swaggering jocks, charming or bollocking journalists until they wrote something nice about Sir Tony Blair’.

The policy wonks are concerned about the development of effective policy. Of course there is overlap between the two but it is characteristic of the politicos to be concerned about articulating (often poorly defined) policy goals which sound plausible but are not implementable. Think of boot camps for which there is no evidence of their effectiveness – let alone cost effectiveness – but resonate with the public and so win votes. How many policy proposals of this government – indeed of every incoming government – are on the list of such examples?

Very often the politicos have studied politics at university and pop up in advisory positions to incumbent politicians. There are lots of good reasons for studying political processes but, alas, understanding how policy is made is not one of them in New Zealand. In principle, one can take policy studies courses, but my impression is they don’t contain enough gritty case studies – the devil is in the detail.

A salient example of the approach of ‘politicos’ is Elon Musk who having helped Trump get elected, wanted to downsize the US government. Even if we ignore his exaggerated promises typical of the Trump administration, his attempts were a failure because he had no understanding of how the bureaucracy worked; the outcome has been damage followed by (often ineffective) damage control.

The distinction is useful to understand the ‘paradox of Jacinda’. Ardern with a degree in communications and politics and an adult life spent in politics, was a prime minister who was superb in her first term to the extent that her party won a majority of seats in the election at its end. But in the second term, it lost support to the point that she retired early and her party was electorally demolished.

A common trope is that her loss of popularity was because she was a woman, but that has not applied to the same degree to Jenny Shipley, Helen Clark or Judith Collins. The Economist dichotomy provides useful insights, although it is not a perfect fit.

As signalled by the title of her memoir, A Different Kind of Leadership, Ardern saw herself as a leader, skills greatly required in her first term during a number of crises, notably the Covid pandemic and the mosque massacres. (I just marvelled at her handling of the latter, although it is likely that Bill English, say, would have done as well leading during the brunt of the pandemic.)

Her Labour Government could excuse itself for not having much policy during its first term because it was generally quite unprepared for winning the 2017 election. A few – very few – ministers were prepared but their achievements did not amount to an overall direction. Ardern promised ‘transformation’ but that was aspiration without content.

Fortunately for her, and for her Labour Government, the first term was riddled with issues where leadership was vital; Ardern handled them well. Hence the election of a majority Labour Government in 2020. Now was the time for policy which would lead to the promised transformation.

It did not happen. It was not so much that the government was unprepared for policy changes but there was no coherence in the overall direction and some, especially the penchant for centralisation, were in the wrong direction. I have detailed this in my book In Open Seas.

Ultimate responsibility rests with Ardern and her Minister of Finance, Grant Robertson. They may be contrasted with their predecessors, Helen Clark and Michael Cullen, both of whom were policy wonks. (That I give them this attribute does not mean I support all their directions. I have various hesitations with Clark; Cullen I am more comfortable with. Bill English was a policy wonk too; Key was not, as his abortive attempt to change the flag demonstrates – his role was political leadership.)

It is instructive that Ardern’s policy achievement with the greatest transformational potential was the 2018 Child Poverty Reduction Act which gets little mention in her memoir (see my Chapter 22). Arden was not the policy wonk to implement its strategy; she largely employed advisers like her. They were rich with goodwill towards the ambition, but they did not understand the technical issues – the devil is in the detail. The act became aspirational and has achieved little.

I puzzle over Robertson. He too was a politics graduate but had more experience outside the political system. (I am not judging his macroeconomic management here.) In the end I conclude he was not a policy wonk like Cullen or English. He too proposed a transformational policy, probably driven by work which began in Treasury even before English. But the promise to pursue wellbeing rather than output was never bedded in, despite it being, in my view, the economic approach of the future. (See my Chapter 2.) Instructively, it was hardly mentioned in Labour’s 2023 campaign (poverty reduction couldn’t be because there was hardly any). There was not the sort of dual leadership which characterised the Key-English Government.

Instructively, the current Luxon-led Government has wound back most of the Ardern-Hipkins legacies. It was partly because some were misconceived, but also because the current government has a quite different account of the economy and its future. They have yet to convince us it is forward looking.

Neither Christopher Luxon nor Nicola Willis are policy wonks, although some ministers are dealing with their portfolios more than competently. Luxon’s ‘going for growth’ strategy seems to have come from the politicos among his advisers. They are all sausage and no sizzle. Thus the increasing dismay of the public towards the government. Same happened to the recent Labour Government in its second term.

If there are any policy wonks near the current government, they may be advising ACT although they show little of the political judgement of politicos. 

It is too early to judge the efforts of the Opposition – whether Labour has learned from its failure in government. (It should read my book; even if I have it wrong it may stimulate them to get it less so.) Aotearoa New Zealand is going through a rapid social and economic transition but most of the public discussion is backward looking.

The choice between politicos and wonks is that the politicos are better at attaining and maintaining office, but their policy achievements are aspirational and rarely effective; policy wonks find it harder to get elected but when they are, they have the power to change. The Economist article is about getting the balance right.

*Brian Easton, an independent scholar, is an economist, social statistician, public policy analyst and historian. He was the Listener economic columnist from 1978 to 2014. This is a re-post of an article originally published on pundit.co.nz. It is here with permission.