Burning down the house

Even this late in the piece, it's still a shock

In 1999, the National Party lost New Zealand’s general election to Labour, Jenny Shipley ceding the Prime Minister’s office to Helen Clark.

New Zealand does not have a pomp and ceremony transition of power, or a US-style clean-out where all the cogs of Government are halted and re-tooled for a new administration.  It’s not even a change of head of State, just a shuffling at the government level after all. 

In 1999, I was Jenny Shipley’s chief press secretary. For me, the transition was abrupt, even a bit merciless: by the evening of election day when the result was clear, the phone just stopped.  It had harassed me pretty much around the clock for the previous couple of years.  Now it was dead. 

Nobody was interested anymore.  They had moved on. Get used to it. So you did.

Meetings were arranged between the two leaders and their staffs to sort out matters that had to be dealt with. There were generous agreements about handover dates. There was packing of boxes, clearing of offices. There were a few “what do we do about this?” moments about inconsequential stuff like minor gifts and surplus stationery.

I don’t know if New Zealand has a tradition of the outgoing PM leaving a note for the next one on the big desk.

It all seemed pretty unremarkable, like shifting house, or the end of year at school.

One day in the Beehive ninth floor office, Mark Prebble, the head of the Department of Prime Minister & Cabinet, said to me that while it may seem pretty humdrum, it was anything but that really.  Take it all in, he said. This is the peaceful transition of power. It’s the thing people have fought for centuries to achieve.  It’s still wildly impossible in many countries. 

Mark Prebble, you probably won’t remember, had been labelled by Helen Clark in Opposition Leader mode as the “apostle of the New Right,” and she was about to become the Prime Minister he would serve.  I don’t know what he might have thought about that. I presume he concluded it was the sort of thing politicians say when they need to, and that democracy was something bigger than all that. (And he would have been right; he built the confidence of the new Prime Minister and stayed in the job for several more years.)

So the seemly and largely unceremonial transition of power trundled quietly and quickly on.  Nothing to see here.

I had thought I would write a bit about the New Zealand transition to coincide with the United States inauguration on 20 January. Then today happened in Washington DC.

I suppose I thought I’d make some glib observations about peaceful transitions depending on everyone agreeing to make them happen, like agreeing to wait at a red light. I hadn’t thought it could come to this. Which was a bit stupid. He’s been talking about it for years.