The Post: What will be Luxon’s ‘John Key’ moment of bipartisanship?

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In 2007, John Key made a move that, by putting the nation’s best interests ahead of political point-scoring, left commentators “flabbergasted”. In aiding his opponents, he enhanced his own reputation. The question now is whether Christopher Luxon has it in himself to do the same.

Back in 2007, the issue at hand was the anti-smacking bill put forward by Green MP Sue Bradford, which sought to prevent parents from invoking the defence of “reasonable force” when accused of hitting their children. For two years, debate over the bill had been acrimonious, and the country sharply divided.

Opponents said it would criminalise parents who smacked their children. The National caucus was firmly against it. But eventually a way out of the dilemma emerged: the setting of a threshold below which the police would not prosecute.

According to contemporary reports, Key met Bradford in April that year and suggested that smacks of a “minor and inconsequential” nature might be allowed. Although Bradford didn’t immediately accept the suggestion, prime minister Helen Clark had her eye on something similar.

She soon got Bradford and Key to agree that exempting “inconsequential” smacks – with no mention of “minor” – was an acceptable compromise. The bill then passed by 113 votes to seven, and once a misleadingly worded referendum had been rightly ignored, a near-consensus on the issue settled.

All three main actors had behaved well, not just Key. But his actions are especially notable now, in these polarised times, given his role as one of our current prime minister’s political idols. Key could have entrenched his opposition to the bill, exploiting the situation and ratcheting up the political pressure on Clark.

Instead he accepted a bipartisan consensus in the name of the common good. Respected political commentator Audrey Young declared herself “flabbergasted”, praising Clark’s “remarkable statesmanship”, but also declaring the episode “a real victory for Key”.

In retrospect, this was probably the highwater mark of Key’s bipartisanship, before he descended into the dirty politics so searingly exposed by Nicky Hager’s book of the same name. Nonetheless it reminds us that compromise is possible – or, at least, it once was.

Politics, of course, needn’t always end in consensus. The platforms of our two main political parties, Labour and National, are already too alike, especially on economic issues. The tepid soup of semi-indistinguishable policies is surely a turn-off for voters, and we would be better served, on the whole, by a sharper contrast between the two sides. Let divergent ideas be put forward, and tested in debate.

At the same time, nothing is more frustrating than to see parties opposing each other not because they truly disagree but because it is politically expedient. Where consensus or compromise is possible, as with the anti-smacking legislation, it should be sought. All the more so when society seems increasingly polarised.

A big question for Luxon, then, is this: what will be your John Key moment? What is the issue on which you will reach across the aisle and seek consensus in the name of the greater good?

Someone should put the question directly to the prime minister. If all he could manage was a rebuff – “What I’d say to you is, Labour was such a useless government that there’s really no point trying to work with them now” – he would have failed to meet the challenge of our age, and left the fractures in our politics to deepen.

Luxon’s record so far on bipartisanship is not good: consider, for instance, his withdrawal from the “townhouse nation” accord on suburban house-building. Yet there is, fortunately, a strong new candidate for consensus: the infrastructure pipeline. As Simplicity’s Sam Stubbs pointed out this week, and the Helen Clark Foundation has recently argued, bipartisan agreement on a future building programme would help us all.

One key reason that infrastructure costs so much here is the stop-start nature of the work. We bring in a tunnel-boring machine for a big job, then send it back overseas because no-one can agree on the next project. Building is poorly co-ordinated; skilled workers are lost.

Infrastructure, of course, is political, and people like former business leader Phil O’Reilly believe it will never be the subject of consensus. But in the Venn diagram of Labour and National policy, there is surely a large overlapping area.

Just agreeing basic standards for maintenance, which represents a huge chunk of infrastructure spending, would be a good start. Consensus, in short, could be sought on the overlap, without preventing either party from campaigning on the items that lie outside it.

Labour, with perhaps the most to gain from such an accord, is willing. At a Fabian Society event I chaired in February, infrastructure spokesperson Barbara Edmonds said she would “absolutely” pick up the phone if Luxon called. The challenge has thus been laid. Will the prime minister rise to it?