Donovan’s World

In each case, there’s a bright new person competing against an establishment figure; and in each case, that established figure is claiming that his or her opponent should be damned for lack of Experience.

As Barack Obama strides, with consummate presidential poise, upon the hustings stages his opponent, John McCain positions himself as an old (but not too old) soldier with huge experience not only through conflict in actual wars but also as a senator from way back. He’s seen it all, he’s even been a prisoner of war subjected to torture. How could America possibly trust Obama more than McCain? Meanwhile Obama promises ‘change’, what else? Here we have the young, handsome new man against the saurian senior citizen.

Similarly in Great Britain, David Cameron is set to battle in 2010 against a man who walked in the shadow of Tony Blair in much the same way as Prince Charles follows the Queen. By the time Blair left office it was all a bit too late. Gordon Brown has been around for a long time, and has, he says, enormous experience when set alongside Cameron. But beside the fresh faced Cameron, Brown looks like an old horsehair-stuffed sofa whose innards are falling out and whose policies are imploding.

Here in New Zealand, Helen Clark pitches herself against John Key by emphasizing, again and again, her experience (as does Michael Cullen, Tonto to her Loan Ranger). She highlights John Key’s relative newness to politics as a weakness. She has, after all, been prime minister for nine years.

But inexperience, in this context, is not a weakness; it is a strength. Experience is just another way of saying ‘we’ve always done things this way.’ The longer the experience the more entrenched become attitudes and the less able are people to change their ways, think with imagination, and light up our world. They cannot believe that there can be a better way; it shows up when all they can do is try to diminish new policies by saying they won’t work ‘…we’ve been around a long time and we say they won’t work!’.

Consider this: for all her political experience Helen Clark completely lacks balance. She has never had a career outside politics. Her whole life has been spent in the public sector; a profit taker paid for by the tax payer. She has no children, she glosses over her marital status. She has no conception of what it takes to run a company or work in the private sector. She has never had to make profits in order to employ and pay workers, satisfy shareholders or pay company taxes. She has never had to change a nappy, or attend to a fractious or sick child in the middle of the night, she has never had to get the school lunch, do the school run, cook, wash, clean, iron for a standard family or buy their clothes. She cannot (for LACK of experience) understand the everyday stresses of everyday life.

John Key, on the other hand, represents everything to which a normal New Zealand family might aspire. A humble, working class upbringing nurtured by a solo mother; an ordinary schooling; boot-strap achievement leading on to commercial success on the world stage, whence he has returned to work for the country of his birth. As most of us would wish to be he is a self-made multi-millionaire. He’s not ashamed of that; why should he be?

Key has a typical Kiwi marriage to an attractive wife who has borne them healthy, happy children. He knows what family life is all about and he can understand the needs, hopes and desires of the ordinary New Zealand family. (As can, by the way, his number two: Bill English).

Why would John Key want to give up a career that would earn him far greater financial reward than politics? Some say power. I don’t think that’s the driver; I happen to believe that there is, in him, a ‘nouveau noblesse oblige’ that drives him to work for us New Zealanders because of a sense of duty, not power.

And while he may lack that stultifying experience in politics that the dinosaurs decry him for not having, he brings enormous experience of life in the round and in the cockpit of international commerce. John Key is capable of making New Zealand as successful as he has been.

As with Obama and Cameron, our future is all about Change. Ms Clark et al you can keep your stale smelling political experience: I’ll take Key for preference any time.