Right and wrong

When a British Conservative MP wishes to address the establishment, he will do so via The Daily Telegraph. Such was the significance of Conservative leadership candidate David Davis using a Telegraph interview to denounce the “religious right” in his party.

He would, he said, resist the push for harsh abortion laws and a flat tax from his party’s “hard right”, in favour of making people — women and professionals especially — “feel good” about voting Tory again.

Things are at an odd pass when a far-from-left Tory feels the need to fend off an American-style conservative push. But perhaps something similar is happening closer to home. In a radio interview with Simon Pound, National Party historian Barry Gustafson recently said that the “ideologically driven radical right” had “seized control” of National for Election 2005, and taken its philosophy away from the “traditional pragmatic conservatives” in caucus. He warned that its new intake would not be satisfied with “over-simplified slogans” on the Treaty, immigration and moral issues.

This is a little problematic for National. After all, it was the blithe certainties of Orewa that got it back in the game. And with the exception of nagging lefty bloggers, no one has really explored the extent of campaign support National derived from the religious right in the 2005 campaign.

The Maxim Institute mounted a substantial MMP ‘education’ campaign whose gist was essentially to consolidate the moral conservative vote behind National. The message, delivered on a DVD and through seminars around the country, was carried through various conservative Christian organisations, including the Vision Network and Radio Rhema. “A vote for a third party is a wasted vote,” read a cut-and-paste editorial in the Pohutukawa Coast Times. “It is not only a wasted vote, it is actually a vote for a party you may not like on the basis that any party that doesn’t make the 5% threshold (or win a seat) has its vote redistributed among the parties that do cross the threshold.”

In reality, of course, no fewer than six ‘third parties’ are present in the new Parliament, and a vote for any of them would not have been discarded. But the strategy was successful: Christian Heritage and Destiny New Zealand had their votes hoovered up by National, and United Future was savaged. The discarded vote was very low.

Ironically, Act even tried to hitch a ride with a bizarre pamphlet by Stephen Franks, which warned against voting for religious parties (“Tactically they siphon Christian votes into ineffectiveness”) and murmured darkly about homosexuals’ “self-damaging behaviour”.

And there was, of course, the $500,000 (equal to one-seventh of National’s own campaign budget) spent by the Exclusive Brethren on a nationwide pamphlet campaign. Just quietly, the Brethren also had its young folk erecting National billboards, delivering National’s own pamphlets and even, allegedly, push-polling on National’s behalf. It was quite a useful force.

What’s wrong with that? They’re just ordinary churchgoing New Zealanders, aren’t they? Hardly. The campaign was devious (to take one example, two of the pamphlets were ‘authorised’ by a fake health pressure group). And this is a sect that National MP Nick Smith accused of being “sinister”, “brutal” and “extreme”; of “brainwashing” children and driving escapees to suicide. But that was in 1992: different times, presumably.

A great deal of energy has been expended in the last three years in the pursuit of the moral backlash. The Sunday Star-Times devoted weeks this year to a ropey -self-selected survey that said voters were preparing to punish Labour over civil unions and prostitution law reform. But on the day, it was the churchgoing people of South Auckland who turned out and won the election for Labour.

The fact is that, for all the press it gets, the new moral right does not look like New Zealand. And more to the point, the odour of moral authoritarianism and silly carping about the ‘mainstream’ turned away a crucial group of voters who were otherwise well disposed towards National’s tax policy.

As did, for that matter, National’s breathtaking Treaty stance and its plans to put immigrants on “probation”. These weren’t policies, they were slogans, as evidenced by the alarming way they were extended on the hoof. They might have worked in the regions but they backfired in town.

The same kids who have grown up free of the old assumptions about the welfare state have also learned about the Treaty, and don’t resent it. They are social liberals. They’re not all white. They wear tight little ‘Porn Star’ T-shirts. Dammit, they’re probably even taking drugs.

There are obvious attractions in the kind of easy relationship with capitalism the religious right has formed in America, and the organisational muscle it brings. National will also be glad to see its Treaty message resonating in the regions. But can you govern on this stuff? And is National really going to nurture the religious right by, say, defending the teaching of ‘intelligent design’?

I once received a snippy email from a National MP that used “diversity” like it was a bad word. Well, I’m sorry, but diversity is a reality in my city, and it’s growing. Narrowness didn’t work: even though Labour monumentally messed up its tax policy, its vote held. And unless National wants to give Labour a big leg-up in 2008, it should set about re-modernising itself now.

russb@dubwise.co.nz