Sunday 27th March, 2011

Q+A’s Panel Discussions.

The full length video interviews and panel discussions from this morning’s Q+A can also be seen on tvnz.co.nz at, http://tvnz.co.nz/q-and-a-news

Q+A is broadcast live on TV ONE between 9-10am on Sunday mornings and repeated on TVNZ 7 at 9.10pm on Sunday nights and 10.10am and 2.10pm on Mondays.

In response to KEVIN RUDD interview

PAUL Time to welcome our excellent panel. This week, Dr Jon Johansson from Victoria University; the Right Honourable Sir Don McKinnon, former Commonwealth Secretary General and former deputy prime minister of New Zealand, and now the Auckland Museum director – or a director of the Auckland Museum; and Matt McCarten, Unite Union leader and Herald on Sunday columnist. Welcome, all of you. What did you make of him? Does he remind you of anyone?

DR JON JOHANSSON – Political Analyst
Well, we had a robust discussion about that. Don mentioned Jimmy Carter, and, you know, that’s a very appealing analogy, just in the sense that, you know, highly intelligent, but nonetheless absolute pants as a leader.

MATT MCCARTEN – Unite Union Leader
You can see why he got rolled as leader.

(laughter)

JON I mean, God knows what his caucus meetings were like.

PAUL Did you understand the answer to the question on do we tell the Chinese about democracy?

JON Uh, yes. It was ‘no’.

(laughter)

PAUL Very good. Let’s talk about Libya, because, Don, you have met Gaddafi, what, five occasions?

SIR DON MCKINNON – Former Commonwealth Secretary General
Probably at least five occasions, and I would say now that he’s a very desperate man, mostly because he would have been very surprised that the Arab League and the Gulf Cooperation Council came out in favour of the coalition against him. Now, these are his friends. These are his friends throughout North Africa and in the Middle East, and the fact they’ve turned against him, he’ll be very worried. I don’t believe he’s going to lose office. I believe he’ll hang on, but it will be a messy situation for a long time. I think what he’s got to fear most – I think he’ll soon be indicted by the International Criminal Court, and that will really slow him down.

PAUL Mm. Is he barking?

DON Look, all the times that I met him, he… He’s very hostile. He’s been there 40 years. You know, you can’t stay normal after being in office 40 years. But he tried to follow Anwar Sadat as head of the Arab states. That failed. He then turned his sights on the whole of Africa. He wanted to be the president of Africa. The last time… Well, second to last time I saw him, he’s built this huge parliament in the town of Surt in Libya, where he wants to be the African parliament, and he wants to be the president of Africa. However, sub-Saharan Africa don’t really see him as an African.

JON But there’s a method in his barking madness too, I’d suggest, bar for one caveat I thought of last night. You know, he absolutely destroyed his civil society. He set up a whole rat’s nest worth of network of paid informants. 10% to 20% of the Libyan population, they estimate, inform on each other.

PAUL Like the East Germans.

JON Yeah, so there’s no trust in that community. But, actually, where I actually think, from his perspective, he went wrong is in educating his people. 82% -- they have the highest literacy in Africa, and that’s part of the seeds of his destruction.

PAUL I suppose that was Mubarak’s problem in a way as well, wasn’t it?

JON Yeah.

PAUL Look, we’ve got… Kevin Rudd something interesting about… You know, Hilary Clinton was saying this the other day too, about how if we hadn’t gone in, we would have been looking at butchery. Let’s see what Kevin Rudd says here.

KEVIN RUDD: If there was no authorisation for the UN Security Council through that resolution, today you and I would be discussing the butchery of Benghazi. That’s what we’d be discussing.

PAUL And, see, he made it completely clear that his troops, when they went into Benghazi, would go into every house.

MATT He didn’t help himself, and that’s actually right, and that’s the dilemma. I think, you know, it is a complex position. I mean, you could argue is he doing any more than the regime in Russia with Chechnya, with Israel, with Gaza. Now we’ve got Bahrain bringing in sword troops to put their people down. It is actually a quagmire, but what they have got themselves into now… You’re right about he was going to go in there and sort them out. But it is actually a sort of thing that… We’ve gotten ourselves into a position – the West has gotten itself into a position – they’re in now, and they’ve got to go for regime change. However they pretend it’s not, it is, because they can’t get out of it unless there is.

JON How are they going to effect that without ground troops?

MATT Well, this is what the British are talking about: ‘We’ve got to take this guy out.’ I mean, it is actually now… You know, this will just go week by week by week. The longer they’re in there, they’re going to have to have a regime change.

DON This is where the West can sometimes get a bit bored after while. The no-fly zone can exist, but the activity will be less and less and less. We get our attention turned elsewhere. If he’s smart, he will just try and kind of…

MATT …hold off.

PAUL But they bombed his tent before. Why don’t they just bomb his tent?

DON Well, he’ll be on the move very rapidly.

MATT He’s going to hide out. I mean, this no-fly zone which goes on – you know, you get the impression it keeps the planes out of the sky. Actually, they’re going after the tanks right from day one. They’re going after the soldiers. You know, this is actually war.

PAUL Can they do it with air strike alone? I mean, if they wanted to effect regime change, can they do it with air strikes alone?

DON No, it is ultimately people on the ground. It’s only the Libyan people that actually really effect change in that country, and it’s going to take a bit to do that.

MATT No, they can do it. They’re not going to send troops in, but they can arm the opposition.

JON And they will be, Matt.

MATT And they will.

PAUL So when you say that you think he’ll stay, Don – what, president of kind of a tortured, divided country?

DON Well, he may be forced to realised… He’s losing all his friends. I mean, all those Arab states – they are his closest friends. They’ve now vacated him. They’re telling him, ‘It’s time you went.’ He will probably try and cobble together something which looks alright to give him some kind of escape path. He may be already talking to the Saudis.

MATT I agree with that. It’s got to be a political solution. The West need a political solution – the Arab League and maybe the African Union in to broker the deal, because they’ve got to get themselves out of this mess.

PAUL You see, why Gaddafi particularly when we talk about leaders turning on their own people. Anne has texted us in. She said, ‘What about Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, who’s a dictator murdering his own people? 2000 bodies found with flesh still on their bodies.’ I don’t know quite what she means by that, by Mugabe, I suppose, can sin because he’s a long way from the coast.

MATT And he hasn’t got oil.

PAUL (laughs) Hasn’t got oil.

DON I wouldn’t put them in the same category, though, all the same, but, yes, there is an issue, but you’ve got to have all the others around you with you. The other African states would not support that kind of resolution on Zimbabwe. But here you’ve got Arab states supporting a resolution on Libya.

PAUL And Hilary Clinton, of course, very wisely deciding to get America out of the leadership of it very quickly.

DON The move to NATO was very swift and very cute.

JON I saw I poll, Paul, that this action in Libya has the least support of beginning a campaign of any military engagement America has had in the last six decades. The American people are exhausted.

MATT Well, it’s just because it’s the third one, isn’t it?

JON Yeah, yeah.

********************

In response to PHIL GOFF interview

PAUL Welcome back to Q+A. Jon Johansson, Sir Don McKinnon and Matt McCarten. Well, you’ve written very vigorously about Phil Goff’s last couple of weeks, Matt McCarten, in the Herald on Sunday today. How safe do you think his leadership is?

MATT I think he’s safe. You’re quite right – I mean, there’s no one who’s doing the challenge. But that’s part of the problem, which is annoying, because everyone is talking about how they’re feeling in the caucus and about poor Darren and poor Phil and all that. Well, what about all the people getting screwed by this government? You know, and the narrative inside the Labour Party which drives me nuts is, ‘We know Phil is not up to it, but he’ll be alright, and we’ll lose the next election and then we’ll replace him.’ And isn’t someone trying to win here? You know, what we’ve got is Phil – the polls for him personally have been low. He’s never had a wide mandate for the job. You know, it was Helen Clark, resigned, straight in. And so what we’ve got is he’s competent enough – I though up till now – but I think that what the Labour Party’s doing is really just going through the motions.

PAUL OK, got you. Now, what should he have done? I mean, Jon Johansson, Don McKinnon, what should he have done when Darren Hughes told him his story?

DON Look…

PAUL Do you agree with Phil Goff?

DON Well, I’ve seen these things played out a number of times over 20 years, and I thought after 30 years in politics, his skills would have been far more sensitive to what is necessary, which is the party’s got to come first. Look, when a ball goes up in the air like this, you’ve got to catch it on the full. You do not let it bounce. And a bouncing rugby ball goes anywhere. He’s no Mils Muliaina retrieving that sort of situation, and that’s unfortunate.

PAUL So he could, what, have stood Darren Hughes down and probably made a statement, yes?

DON Put him out straight away. Say, ‘Look, you’ve got to go home for a while. Go and do some gardening.’

PAUL That was Mike Williams’ view, wasn’t it?

JON I was just going to say that it reached my end of the grapevine about the 12th of March, right. And then the following week, I was staggered to see that Darren Hughes was going to be participating in a debate – you know, a fundraiser debate on the subject of grubby politics. And, you know, how can they not see the hubris of this? You know, it just seems to me that, at a time when we actually really need a vigorous, competent Opposition holding the government to account, post-earthquake and all of this…

PAUL Yeah, dammit, the country’s had a lot to deal with this year.

JON We just haven’t got time for this sort of diversion.

MATT When one of your MPs comes into your offices, saying, ‘Look, I’ve got the police are going to charge I had a guy at my house who ran out naked at 5 in the morning. I’m in trouble and I’ve been charged – well, an investigation’s one.’ You say, ‘Brother, you’re toast.’

JON Absolutely.

MATT That’s what you do.

JON And I think that’s one of the elements here is it is, unfortunately, and, you know, it’s because of… You know, Darren is not Dover Samuels. Darren was like their court jester…

MATT Or Richard Worth.

JON Or Richard Worth, you know, during the Clark years. So he is sort of more core family, and so I think that’s lead to this fatal sort of indecision about what to do, but how did they not think?

MATT And that is extraordinary. I didn’t know, but what you’re saying is you phone your president up and say, ‘Look, there’s going to be some problems. You’d better all get prepared.’

JON Cos it is a party matter.

DON I think there are stronger messages there, really, of the uncertainty on the question of Phil Goff. When your party president says publicly, ‘I haven’t heard about this,’ that is a massive communication breakdown. Now, I think he intentionally said that, and that’s not a good thing anyway.

PAUL You also believe a plan should have been put in place. I mean, we did have a very… I mean, the ball bounced three times, didn’t it?

MATT Well, it wasn’t two weeks. It was nearly three weeks.

DON The plan should be a reflex one. You see something like that, you’ve just got to do it immediately.

JON And if you’re a prudent politician, you assume the worst: what’s the worst thing that can happen here? And then you plan accordingly and work backwards from there.

MATT And Phil was sort of discussing about the police thing, and just kept to it that somehow this was a criminal case and you’ve got to see justice take its course. Are you serious? This is politics. And your interview with him, and he just wouldn’t let it go, and he kept pushing it back and pushing it back and pushing it back. And it wasn’t a naivety. It was a defensiveness of saying, ‘I’ve done nothing wrong. That this problem was outside my…’

DON This lesson here is, you know, every member of parliament is under constant scrutiny all the time. You know, don’t ever think you can keep things hidden in your cupboard if you’re a member of parliament. It will come out. It will come out, and just be prepared for it.

JON Everyone knows in parliament there have been other instances. They know. There have been other instances.

PAUL And so many resignations.

JON Well, you know, another element here, to me, is that, you know, there’s been a lot of support for Darren, because he is a very likeable individual.

MATT He is, yeah.

JON But let’s not forget here that, to me, there’s a lot of hubris here about this individual. He’s 32 years old, and that’s pretty young to have that degree of hubris. I… Prudent judgement. When Darren Hughes went through my politics programme at Vic, that is what we try and instil in our young. He does not seem to have picked up that lesson as well as some of our other graduates. You know, we’re quite disappointed with him.

PAUL Quick word – much damage to the party? Quick word.

MATT Uh, yes.

ENDS

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