The Suborning of a Preppie Tyro
It's official. John Key has now morphed. He has become archetypical of the politician in these long years of the declension and fall of the West.
Lucia Maria has kindly transcribed an awkward interview of John Key by Mike Hosking on the debacle over Section 59. It is filled with qualifications, circumlocution, fudging, hedging, and double speak. He is showing himself to have become a Class A politician: his weaving and ducking is a classic in the genre. Honest John now clothes himself in the smelly garb of Thenardier, the self-serving, amoral, venal, predatory innkeeper of Les Miserables.
The distance of hero to zero is just one small step for a politician, and John Key has taken it. By continuing to maintain that "the law is working well", Key shows himself to have lost touch with actual, day-to-day family life. He has also lost touch with how the law actually functions. Every time you read the growing number of cases documented and published in national newspapers by Family First (and co-published on their website) your blood starts to boil. You compare the actual reality with the "beltway" myopia of "it's all working just fine" and see intuitively and immediately how much Key has been suborned by professional insiders--and marvel that this has happened in such a short space of time.
We highlight two major deficiencies in the Prime Minister's mental wardrobe that have allowed this transformation to take place. The first is his reported view that political success comes from focusing on the issues that matter and that in New Zealand the "heartland" issues are jobs, rising standards of living, and overall prosperity. It turns out that in Key's mental frame issues arising out of the areas of family law and raising children are relatively unimportant and, therefore, distractions.
This view, which we might call the Key Doctrine, enunciated ad nauseam to his caucus, deserves to be ranked as one of the most inept miscalculations of recent history and explains why he has so quickly lost touch with reality. The idea that man is first and foremost "economic man" may fit with a bankrupt materialistic view of life. But it is wrong, and radically so. One of the deepest well springs of all human society is the self-sacrificial love parents bear to children. If it were not so, why would the society in general find genuine child abuse so grotesque and depraved? Despise that, and you despise the core of what it means to be a human being. Compared with that, economics never rises above the realm of the insubstantial. This is Key's first miscalculation.
Secondly, Key apparently has not stopped to think through what he is actually saying. He acknowledges (without being honest, upfront, and candid about it) that the law in the case of Section 59 is an ass, and that it is not working. This acknowledgement is implicit in his decision to review, monitor, and establish new guidelines for the police and the agencies of state. This, says Key, will give "comfort" to NZ parents, while we get on with the really important things of putting more money into peoples' pockets.
But, here's the thing. Key is saying to all NZ parents: "trust us". Key is asking New Zealanders to believe that politicians and the agencies of state can be trusted to be reasonable and apply the law of common sense." Imagine! The sentiment comes straight out of the Annette King playbook.
What Key should be saying to the people is not, "trust me," but "I trust you". In moving from insisting the government fundamentally trust the people, to asking people to trust the government with their intrusions and interferences in family life, Key's miscalculating madness stands naked and exposed.
This is far worse than light bulbs. That was just a trifling irritant. Key's position on Section 59 is a betrayal; he has gone over to the dark side.
We will not forget.
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