Is Helen Clark Jerry Seinfeld?

By Vincent Heeringa

Thursday 1st August 2002

No, because only one of them makes you laugh

If this government were a sitcom, which show would it be? Previous regimes are easy to identify. Jenny Shipley's time at the helm was a sort of Roseanne meets At Home with the Braithwaites: big woman presides over dysfunctional family. The Bolger-Peters combo was like Beavis and Butthead: a couple of unsophisticated country kids with surprising popular appeal. The Lange government started out as Happy Days, all youth and enthusiasm, moved into Malcolm in the Middle, where the kids are revolting, and ended in the kind of disarray topped only by Fawlty Towers.

What about this lot? Surely this government, and this election, is Seinfeld. I mean, look at the characters. Kramer, the nutty but charming genius who invented the "Bro" bra for overweight men, is Pete Hodgson, the only person in New Zealand to view carbon taxes as a way to get rich. George, the busy and failing balding one, is Trevor Mallard, who has managed to get offside even with his own friends, the teachers. And Jerry, well, he's the smug and apparently clever one, whose answers to everything are so assured you wonder just how scripted this show is. That's Helen Clark. (With the notable exception of the Greens/John Campbell genetically modified "ambush", but more of that later.)

As with Seinfeld, it has been a government about nothing. This election isn't about much, either. Apart from the Greens, there are no ideological struggles here. Like its British counterpart, this Labour Government has successfully absorbed leftist social ideals into the right's economic framework. On the economic front, what's changed really? This government, like its dull predecessor, is fiscally prudent, a moderate taxer and careful spender. Despite Michael Cullen's raves about the Reserve Bank, inflation is still well controlled. The nods towards its pinko constituency, in the form of labour reform, business intervention, tax increases and tertiary education changes, have been moderate by any standard. On the social front, the changes in health governance, school funding, welfare and justice have been just enough to allow ministers to sound left, but not scarily so. Not even Winston Peters can generate an outrage with his "Labour's secret agenda" card - what were the items again?

Is this the first time in history Labour looks most like National with its "born to rule" air?

Until Wednesday 10 July, yes. The Greens' superb ambush, using the well-timed Seeds of Distrust book alleging a government cover-up of GM contamination of imported corn, ruins the tidy Seinfeld-style script Clark and friends had penned. Or, more correctly, what their opposition has let them get away with.

The "Corngate" drama is unfolding as I write but there are lessons emerging already.

Corngate is not, in the first place, a GM problem. As the book's author, Nicky Hager, says, the potential scandal is about integrity and procedure. If it's true there was detectable contamination of the corn seed, the government was bound by its own rules to destroy the whole batch. Instead, the problem was seemingly dealt with by legislating a convenient change in the contamination threshold. That's a poor way to govern.

Or at least it may have been; we still don't know for sure. Which raises another lesson. The very fact that this is a drama shows how irrelevant the rest of the opposition's activities have been. How sorry an election is it when the nation virtually grinds to a halt to listen to the prime minister be grilled over an alleged bureaucratic bungle that's now two years old involving minute percentages of corn seed that may have been contaminated by a substance whose effect is unknown? The day this story broke, Auckland's Queen Street hosted a substantial march by victims of violent crime protesting about the lamentable state of our justice system. How many people have actually been killed, or even made sick, by a 0.5% GM-contaminated corn seed in the last month? I guess you could choke on one. A weak opposition has made it possible for irrelevancies such as Corngate and Paintergate to become the big issues.

A third lesson is this. If Corngate only serves to strengthen Green support (and how can it not?), expect to see a Labour-Green coalition in government this year. That - if the policies on the Greens' website are anything to go by - potentially means an extension of the moratorium on commercial release of GM, a halt on the government's free trade talks with the US and extensions to CER, an increase in import tariffs on some favoured industries, a radical Green review of the Resource Management Act and a reassessment of the government's stated plan of getting back in the top ten OECD economic rankings.

Which highlights the one big difference between Seinfeld and this election. The former was funny.

Vincent Heeringa
vincent@unlimited.net.nz

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