David
SHEARER

Labour Leader
12 July 2012
Speech to Arbitrators’ and Mediators’ Institute of NZ

It's a real pleasure to be here amongst people who like to resolve differences.

You don't have to be in politics too long to discover that some people get more pleasure than they should out of disagreeing for the sake of it - looking for difference.

That's not my style, and I imagine it's not yours either.

I'm not formally trained in your field of expertise, but I certainly have some experience of it.

Typically, it involved the United Nations, and typically it involved dealing with people who were carrying weapons.

I would hope your own workplace environments are more benign.

I worked in Somalia and Liberia, in Rwanda, in Lebanon and Israel, and Afghanistan and Iraq to help people reclaim their lives. I, and those I worked with, believed that there's never such a thing as the point of no return.

Many times, we were able to make things better, simply by talking people around.

And whenever I stepped into the middle of an argument, I learned some more about human nature.

So I thought it might be interesting – and relevant to the work you do here – to talk about some of those experiences.

I hardly need to say it: people can be difficult.

But that doesn't mean they won't shift, or that they won't be open to a fresh suggestion or a new idea.

I suppose if there was one principle that served as a foundation for everything we did, wherever we were, it was this: understand as much as you can about the person on the other side of the table, or wherever.

If you can put yourself in their shoes, if you can imagine how the world looks through their eyes, you'll have something solid to work with.

We worked with people who were, in many different ways, under severe stress.

Israel would be a good example

I ran the UN office based in Jerusalem that coordinated assistance to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.

In your daily life, you were always conscious of the tension between Palestinians and Israeli security.

It wasn’t uncommon to see an Israeli soldier hassle an old Palestinian man.

The young soldier with his boots and his weapon, and the old man frail and hunched, clutching whatever it was he was bringing home from the market.

And you could look at that scene and wonder - Don't they see what they're doing? Don't they see the trouble they're stoking up?

But the soldier wouldn't see it that way.

What he would see was an enemy, and his question - and his great worry - would simply be: What's he carrying?
What's he got in there?

And if you stop and look at him and think about how he has come to see the world the way he does, you see that he's the product of a system.

He’s 20 years old, his family probably faced persecution at some point in their history and he is trained by the army to react in a certain way; possibly scared and braced for violence.

If you could stand in those boots, and see the world through those eyes, then it helped when you sat down at a table with one of his commanders.

We did a lot of that, and the Israelis would always be talking about the same thing: Who gets through.

The checkpoints, and the people who came through them, were everything to them. Sometimes Palestinians were stopped for security reasons, sometimes for strategic reasons or even to punish a village or neighbourhood for something that had happened.

But nothing seemed to matter more than that: who could get through, and who could not.

And so always, when you sat down with them, it was those small particular details they wanted to negotiate around: numbers, opening hours, neighbourhoods.

Success for me meant more Palestinians got to hospital, school, markets or their jobs.

It was obvious to me that for as long as they were fixated on the minutiae, nothing would change.

So we started to shift the perspective.

I said to them:

“Look, I don't want to talk about the details. You decide who you let through, I’m passed arguing.

I want to know do you think what you’re doing now will make your situation better or worse in 10, 15 or 20 years?”

I wanted them to take responsibility for their actions, not shift it to a bargaining table, or to me for not being persuasive enough.

I’m not sure the tactic got more people through, but I’m convinced we didn’t do any worse and it passed ownership of the problem to them.

So you can get that shift.

You can get people to change their perspective, and move, no matter how deadly the stakes.

Sometimes it means persuasion and cajoling, a bit of play acting, playing off the nice guy against the hard-ass character at the appropriate moment.

I remember we had a very long standoff with an Israeli army colonel who insisted on bringing his gun into our office.

I always refused. No guns.

One day Tony Blair was coming in – he said Blair wouldn’t come to our office if his weapons were banned.

I said that was my condition take it or leave it ... and please pass that on to his commanding officer.

Blair did visit and there weren’t weapons.

Sometimes standing firm, setting down principles of interaction and sticking by them can be useful.

And sometimes not, but I won’t go into failures today, it would take too long.

I would be overstating it to say we could always see inside people's minds, however.

Once in Liberia we were out on the road in a convoy and we came to a checkpoint.

And like so many of those checkpoints, each was a mini negotiation – a soldier at the window with a semi-automatic weapon.

And like so many others, the guy with the semi-automatic weapon was a boy who would have been no more than 12, wearing a uniform made for a much bigger man.

After he'd taken his time looking checking our IDs and taking long pauses, he looked at us and said:

"you got exercise books?"

As a matter of fact we did, so with some pleasure I handed him a couple.

And he waved us on.

I said to the guy who was travelling with us as our guide: "how about that?"

“Even in a war zone, the kids were still keen to get an education.”

He looked at me and he said: "Actually, no. They tear out the pages for papers to roll their dope."

I missed getting inside that pair of boots.

If there is another lesson it’s to remain conscious, always, of the importance of status, and inclusion.

In Somalia our continuing challenge was to ensure that relief planes could come in.

Without them, there would be no food.

But to get those planes in needed the approval of many different players.

So we went to meet all the tribes, all the clans, all the leaders, because each could throw a spanner in the works.

And what mattered principally was that they were seen to have been consulted.

They needed it to be known that they were important - that when important matters were decided, they would be involved.

Yes, they might also demand payment, but the crucial issue was that they be seen by their communities to have been asked to grant their consent.

That gave them credibility.

Another important lesson I learned was that although it’s valuable to be able to see the world as others see it,
you need to remain sure you're holding on to your own detachment, or some things may slip past you.

You can get habituated.

There was this time - again, in Liberia - I was being driven to a camp by a Dutch guy who'd been there for some years.

Someone had mentioned cannibalism in the region where we were headed.

I asked him: "Is there anything to what they're telling me about the cannibalism?"

"No, no," he said, "It's a huge exaggeration!"

The truck jeep bounces along the road as he's telling me this.

He goes on: "All they do is, after a killing, is to quickly open the victim’s chest, and eat the still beating heart."

We bounced along again for a few moments, and he paused as he thought about that.

Then he said: "That sounds a lot like cannibalism, I guess."

“Yep”, I said, “it sounds like it a bit to me too”.

Sometimes it can be difficult achieve that separation.

So, yes, it's a life that can leave you jaded and maybe a bit battle hardened, but the thing is, for every example I can give you of human nature being as tough or as harsh as you might imagine, I can give you stories that will give you any amount of hope.

I worked at one time for Save the Children in Sri Lanka where a war was being fought between the government in the south and the Tamil Tiger guerrillas in the north.

One of the jobs I undertook was to take exam papers across the front line from the government side to the Tiger side.

It meant travelling down a single road that was mined on either side.

Eventually we got the exam papers around the various schools.

I stopped at one place and asked community leaders about why exam papers – of all things – were so important to them.

I asked them: why hadn’t we brought them medicine, or food, that were critically in short supply?

I still remember their answer.

They told me that all those other supplies would help with the needs of today, but only an education offered opportunity to those children.

Only an education offered those kids a chance to break out of the cycle of deprivation they were in.

If you're prepared to invest in the future, your fate can change.

I said at the outset that I'm not formally trained in your field, but I would imagine that some of what I've been describing will still have sounded familiar to you.

Fundamental human nature is much the same, wherever you sit down to talk.

I certainly know that as I talk to New Zealanders all around the country – and I've being doing a lot of that – I keep seeing the truth of that principle: to be able stand in the other person's shoes to truly understand how things are for them.

And the thing that has become abundantly clear to me is that we have something of a problem.

People are thinking much more about how to get by today than they are about how we're going to be living in 20 years’ time.

I can hardly blame them for that. For many people life is really tough at the moment.

And most people would tell you that they've never been working harder than they are right now.

But the hard truth is that unless we make really significant changes, as tough as it is now, it’s going to be vastly tougher two decades on from here.

In the words of the late Sir Paul Callaghan, we have chosen to be poor.

We're not doing nearly enough to change that. And people aren't nearly aware just how big a problem that could be for us.

We are thin on the high value industries that prosperous countries can boast of, and overweight on the business where your hourly input equates to a comparatively poor output.

We work harder than almost any country, but we have comparatively little to show for it.

Until we make big changes to the kind of work many of us do, and the investments we make, until we make big changes in how we invest in education and R&D, then nothing is going to change.

Now, in a circumstance like this, I have to say that my mind goes back to that meeting with Israeli soldiers negotiating over the checkpoints and where they saw their lives in the future.

The question I would put to every New Zealander is: are we going to preoccupy ourselves with what's going on right now, in all its particular details, or are we going to start asking the big questions about where we could be in 15 years’ time?

Because if we are prepared to go on seeing our capital dwindle, if we are prepared to see our young people leaving the country, if we are going to cross our fingers and hope that we'll make enough just from selling what we can grow to Asia, then the prospects are not good.

If we don't make big changes, we stand a fairly good chance of becoming a 21st century peasant economy.

And this is where you have to ask a fundamental question about leadership.

Is it fair to people to go on doing what we are, when you know that what we're doing is not enough?

The Prime Minister said in a lecture last week that it's not constructive politics to get ahead of people – that if you don't take them with you, your reforms will run out of engine power.

That's right, as far as it goes, but the lesson I take from that is that leadership is also not being timid and giving people only small and imperceptible change.

The lesson I take from it is that you should listen, find the right words and the right arguments to paint the picture or vision of where we should be – and set out where we could be if we’re prepared to make big changes.

Because a little tinkering here and there is not going to cut it. It's just not.

You have to be able as a leader to get people to imagine a new course if the one they're on is no good.

And it’s about stretching across the political divide and having the courage to forge a truly bipartisan approach for the good of New Zealand.

Now that’s going to take some mediation skills.

It's true in Jerusalem, it's true in Mogadishu, it's true in Kabul, and it’s true in Baghdad.

And it's equally, and just as vitally, true in New Zealand.

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