Andrew Little: A Man for the Time?

In an ideal world good men and good women would be elected to government; the best would achieve high office and a few the highest office in the land. New Zealand, still one of the least politically corrupt nations in the world, may well have come closer to that ideal in the past than many other developed countries.

In the sixties the arrival of television in New Zealand complicated this simple equation.  The largely impersonal relationship between voter and politician, limited mainly to town hall election meetings and radio broadcasts, was gradually displaced  by the intimacy of the television close-up and the advent of the increasingly personal and probing political television interview.

In one sense this was for the public good. Television had the potential to reveal the cracks not only in the politicians’ policies and claims but in the facade of personal virtue which they hoped to project. The small screen was and remains a more effective lie-detector than radio or the town-hall meeting. It exemplifies the dictum that a picture is worth a thousand words.

But television in the 21st century is also first and foremost an entertainment medium. Those who appear on it are required to engage their audience, to hold their attention, to perform. As my colleague Ian Fraser once put it, “to act themselves”. If indeed it ever was, being a good person is no longer enough. You have to look good as well.

Whether being good and looking good, whether being yourself and acting yourself are entirely compatible is not something I want to canvass here. But I do know that if you don’t “come across” on television, your chances of political success are greatly and quite possibly fatally reduced.  

Which brings us to Andrew Little. I thought his reply when questioned about why he had won the Labour leadership, that it must have been “my bubbly personality” was great. But the irony behind that answer was also a clear indication of his awareness that he doesn’t meet the “performance” requirements that commentators like myself regard as essential to the aspiring political leader. Indeed, in a previous post I wrote him off as “a grim-faced, former union leader” with little chance of every becoming Prime Minister. When his supporters subsequently spoke of his having “a dry wit”, I was more inclined to regard it as “arid”. So the “bubbly personality” response was encouraging.

I’m nonetheless not going to resile from my opinion that it will not be easy for Little to win widespread popular support, given his somewhat stern and forbidding “cloth cap” image and the sense, largely confirmed in the election result,  that he is the trade union movement’s creature.

But there is another possibility. Little is known for his honesty, directness and willingness to speak his mind, to “call a spade a spade”. He may just be that “good man” whose appeal may transcend the performance requirements of the television age.

There can be very little doubt that, whether justified or not,  there was widespread voter mistrust of Labour’s former leader, David Cunliffe. John Key’s recent exercise in sophistry, in which he sought to distinguish between when he was speaking as the Prime Minister and when as the Leader of the National Party, not to mention when he was being a loving husband or putting out the cat – well, that was quite simply a moment fatal to his already fading credibility as an honest man.

So maybe, just maybe, someone who speaks his mind, calls a spade a spade and isn’t all that interested in how he “comes across” may be seen by the tens of thousands of primarily Labour voters, too uninterested, too jaded or too disenfranchised to vote in the last election, as just what the doctor ordered. Maybe, just maybe, a gap has appeared in the market. Maybe, just maybe, Andrew Little is a man for the time.