What the Kiri Allan saga says about NZ’s political future

“If my daughter wanted to get into politics, I would beg her not to”, tweeted Shane Te Pou on Thursday evening.

(Me too. And my daughter is studying politics.)

It’s been that kind of week. Or year. Or decade. In which parents caught by their children watching Parliament TV yell: “Don’t look!”

Normally, occupationally, this might apply to a parental desire to dissuade your kids from getting into bomb disposal, or working with OceanGate on submersibles, or joining a tobacco company, or Enron. That politics has joined this fraught parade tells us something pretty bleak.

Kiritapu Allan was elected to Parliament in September 2017.

“Nana, I stand here in this House to honour your name”, she said in her Maiden speech, “and to give voice to the voiceless, who, for whatever their circumstances, cannot speak for themselves.”

(Imagine how proud her family were.)

Less than six years later, she’s gone.

There is nothing good to be said about that. Had her electorate voted her out in October, and (prior to the events of the past week, and despite the swing against Labour) they almost certainly wouldn’t have, it would have been democracy at work. But it was nothing so righteous or so ordinary.

It was, instead, a kind of disintegration. Brutally public, in a fashion that most of our disintegrations aren’t. Cancer, a relationship ending, cyclones and slash in the place you represent (and love), professional misjudgements, accusations of bullying, and a job that demands a superhuman (and almost unnatural) capacity to leave your life, like a patiently leashed dog, out on the Parliamentary lawn.

And then, so awfully, the crash.

“As a high school dropout of the age of 16,” Kiri Allan said in that same Maiden speech, “I entered into the full-time workforce at KFC, with the aspiration to work in every single KFC in this country so that I might see the world!” Even allowing for self-mythologising, that’s a compelling biography for an MP.

We need young women like that to want to enter politics. (And to survive the weight of being there.)

But who would?

One by one, people we voted into Parliament, some of them good, some of them very good, all of them human, are leaving it without the electorate telling them to.

Most aren’t doing it as self-destructively as the MP for East Coast, but their absence is the same.

Kiritapu Allen, Jacinda Ardern, Louisa Wall, Elizabeth Kerekere, Todd Muller, Nikki Kaye. They’re all going or gone. Some quietly. Some amidst a clanging publicity. Some with the kind of dignity it takes immense energy to muster.

This is not to say they’re all people without flaws, but flaws are human, and so is politics. In our House of Representatives (my favourite description of Parliament, because it ought to be true), that sextet feels like a reasonably representative group of us (although, only to a point – they’re all tertiary educated, and they’re all homeowners).

But if all six of them have gone, if parents are warning their children off politics, and if party apparatchiks and high-functioning dullards often (but not always) get the selection committee’s nod in winnable seats, we run three risks.

Firstly, we run the risk of a Parliament shaped by party officials – and by incumbent politicians defining our future in their image.

Secondly, and worse than that (and I suspect this is the point Shane Te Pou was making), we run the risk of people whose skin is not thick enough to withstand a corrosive enmity deciding never to enter politics at all.

And thirdly, we run the risk of our political discourse being reduced to something ragefully partisan and deeply polarised and our Parliament being cowed into policy silence by the fury of that noise.

(Who wants to stand for something when it means you will be subjected to abuse, to threats of violence, to hate?)

This tribalism, and forgive me for returning to it for the second time in a week, is shaping our politics and diminishing it. It contains an ugliness beyond ordinary disagreement and ideological division.

We are not unique in this. Not even close. America has beaten us there and lead us there, too.

As far back as 2014, before Donald Trump became President, before anyone other than The Simpsons and Trump himself thought he could possibly win a Presidential election, a Pew Research survey found “partisan animosity has increased substantially” over the preceding twenty years. “In each party, the share with a highly negative view of the opposing party has more than doubled”.

Highly negative.

“I’ll work as hard for those who didn’t vote for me as those who did”, promised President-Elect Joe Biden during his victory speech in November 2020. “Let this grim era of demonization in America begin to end here and now!”

But it was only gathering speed. And rancour.

Two months later, on January 6, 2021, that now infamous date, a mob of Trump supporters attacked the Capitol Building in Washington, DC. They believed the terrible lie that Trump had won. “Research by Harvard economists”, the Harvard Gazette had reported in June 2020, before the madness of January 6, “finds that politics don’t just influence people’s attitudes about economic issues and policies, it shapes their perceptions of verifiable reality.”

I raised this with Jacinda Ardern when she did a farewell interview during her last week in Parliament in April.

About 16 minutes in, if you care to watch it, I ask her: “If Neve, in twelve years’ time, comes up to you and says, ‘Mum, I want to be a politician’, what would you say to her?”

“Go for it, darling”, she answered.

At the time, I thought she was being brave or denying her most hateful critics agency. But I watched her answer as I was writing this, and I believe she meant it. (Which does seem remarkable.)

Later in the interview, I quoted that famous line of W H Auden’s: “We must love one another or die”, and I asked her (about 22 minutes in, if you’d like to see it for yourself), “how do we disagree without hate?”

Jacinda Ardern answered: “We remember, just that we’re all human. Having the same experience of life, whether we agree or disagree with one another. We first and foremost remember that we’re humans. We remember what we want for our kids, how we want them to be treated, what experience of life we want them to have.”

Amy Adams, another good woman to leave politics, said in her valedictory speech: “The best of this House is when it acts with its humanity taking precedence over its politics”.

Our politicians would do well to remember that. But so too would those of us outside Parliament, whose disagreement spews into hate.

We tend to think it’s the other side that’s guilty of that. But it’s on all sides.

This is not axiomatically an advocacy for the centre. I wrote a fortnight ago, that the centre currently seems a vanilla wasteland, two would-be memes in search of something to strike a pose about. And I have since become besotted with a wonderful piece of writing by Rebecca Solnit in the Guardian.

“Stop glorifying ‘centrism’. It is an insidious bias favouring an unjust status quo”, it’s headlined. And it contains the stand and applauds sentence: “Centrist bias is institutional bias, and all our institutions historically perpetrated inequality.”

But if we want our Parliament to reflect us, if we want good and hopeful people to enter it, if we want it to look like something other than the comfortable holding a convention, we have to learn to disagree without hate.

That’s on us. All of us.

It’s on those of us on Twitter. Or X. Or whatever it’s now called.

It’s on the politicians themselves, whose loud umbrage sometimes feels like a hollowness pretending to stand for something.

“To the parliamentarians: don’t be arrogant or entitled. This is public service”, Nikki Kaye said in her valedictory speech.

Yes. It is. And as the public, that makes them our servants.

Brutally, we can sack them every three years.

We can disagree with them every day.

But we ought not to do so in ways that make parents beg their daughters not to enter politics. And that sends messages to a high-school drop-out with dreams of working at KFC that she is not welcome here. That Parliament is no place for her.

“That government is the strongest of which every man feels himself a part”, said Thomas Jefferson.

Every person.

If the weight is too much to carry once, they get to Parliament, that is a human stumbling. And people stumble.

But if the weight of our enmity is so great that it shapes who dreams of entering Parliament, and reduces our House of Representatives to the blameless, the bland, and the cynically robust, then that is a loss for us all.

In her maiden speech, Kiritapu Allan said: “We named our daughter Hiwaiterangi. Hiwaiterangi is one of the nine stars of Matariki, and it is the star that we cast forth our dreams, hopes, and aspirations to for the crop of the year ahead.”

Hiwaiterangi, too, should be able to dream of entering in Parliament if she wants.

And nothing we do should put a child off.

John Campbell’s regular feature can be found on 1News.co.nz each Saturday until the election in October.