Tony Orman: How does PM John Key’s legacy rate?

In August at the National Party conference, former Prime Minister John Key urged a more measured cautious approach to race issues. It drew forthright reaction.

Writing on the NZCPR website, Geoff Parker said “considering the race-based policies implemented during the last National government, (of which John Key was Prime Minister) many feel Key is out of line—in the debate around race issues.”

Former NZ First MP Michael Laws was more direct on YouTube saying, “The National Party made dreadful mistake yesterday of inviting the former Prime Minister (John Key) to their conference. “The dreadful mistake he added was “because Key was a bad prime minister.”

Michael Laws pulled no punches. “Key is not our elected prime minister and should butt out. Further Luxon needs to sack Key as his ill-chosen mentor and accept that voters who elected him and National into power, are his boss, not Key,” he wrote.

How good was PM John Key? Is his legacy a proud one for New Zealand and the National Party? What did his policies bring to the public interest?

The rise and rise of John Key

On the surface Key’s history looked OK, even impressive as he achieved personal success from a modest childhood background.

Reaching adulthood, Key gained a commerce degree and became a foreign currency trader in Wellington for Australia-based Elders Merchant Finance. Then in 1995, Key worked in Singapore, London and Sydney for American investment bankers Merrill Lynch.

He became noted as a “risk taker” and in 1999 joined the foreign-exchange committee of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and also took management studies courses at Harvard University.

Key returned to New Zealand in 2001 to stand for Parliament for the National Party and won the Helensville (Auckland) seat the following year. Five years later Key then party spokesman for finance was elected to succeed departing National leader Don Brash.

“No Gas in the Tank” Alibi

In the 2008 general election John Phillip Key became prime minister of a MMP coalition government. From there John Key then served as Prime Minister until the eve of the 2017 election when in December 2016, he sprang a surprise by announcing his intention to resign as both party leader and prime minister, citing family reasons and that he had no more ‘gas in the tank’. Were these the reasons?

Key retained his place as a MP in the House until just before 2017 in order to avoid a by-election for that seat. Then in August 2017, John Key was knighted. For what?

After all, astute commentators had questioned the quality of Key’s performance even when he was still prime minister.

Graham Adams’ analysis

In the June issue 2014 of North & South magazine, leading journalist Graham Adams examined New Zealand’s economy during the Key years and wrote “what is extraordinary is that Key is touting himself and Bill English (Minister of Finance at the time) as prudent financial managers, all the while ignoring the $27 million a day they have borrowed on average since taking office.”

In his article, Graham Adams, observed that “after six years of Key’s tenure, the government’s net debt has topped $60 billion” noting that when Key took office in 2008, the net government debt was just over $10 billion.

“It is true the Christchurch earthquake will soak up about a quarter of his total borrowings but his spree was in full flight long before that disaster.”

Graham Adams summed up as follows:-“the billions the Key government has borrowed overseas, in addition to private loans, means New Zealand is in debt up to our nostrils to our foreign masters.”

Blithely failing to consult the public

But economics aside there were other errors that have to be considered in assessing John Key’s legacy. There were strange contradictions in his duty to the people as a prime minister and as a public servant. On several occasions he blithely failed to consult the public.

Key ignored public opinion such as when in April 2010, Prime Minister, he quietly sent Maori Affairs Minister and Maori Party MP Pita Sharples to New York to sign up to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Political commentator Amy Brooke wrote that the covert decision and action by Key and Sharples was “essentially outrageous.”

The clandestine move and signing shocked Labour leader Phil Goff and ACT party leader Rodney Hide. Others were aghast.

Then John Key slipped the word “Aotearoa” onto bank notes. “Aotearoa”, was introduced as the Māori name for New Zealand by European writers William Pember Reeves and Stephenson Percy Smith. The name was never mentioned in the Treaty of Waitangi. Just as with the Sharples clandestine visit to the United Nations, John Key never consulted with the people.

There other instances of John Key flouting democracy.

Democracy diminished

In March 2013 the Tuhoe tribe were given the Urewera National Park along with NZ $170 million. National Parks by statute belong to the people. Yet Key never asked the owners.



In the Dominion Post of May 25, 2010, respected journalist and former Evening Post editor Karl du Fresne wrote a column ‘Deals Behind Closed Doors Diminish Parliament and the People’ and strongly criticised the Key-led government’s shrouded moves to give the people’s Urewera National Park to the Tuhoe tribe.”

The information only reached the public as a result of a leak to television.

Karl du Fresne wrote of the “pressing concern — that the public had been kept in the dark on a matter of vital national interest.” He summed up: “Welcome to the realpolitik of MMP where deals are done out of the public view largely to appease minority parties.

The same happened with Pita Sharples sneaky 2010 trip to New York to sign the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the full implications of which haven’t even begun to emerge.”

There were other colossal failures by the Key administration such as expanded immigration and housing, the former aggravating the ballooning housing shortage.

By late 2016 when Key resigned, household debt, (excluding investment property) had climbed to an historic $163 billion dollars. Under the Key administration, there were a good number of instances of mismanagement and a disdain for democracy.

Deflecting criticism

But one has to admit Key’s incredible political ability to deflect criticism or to put the lid on a brew bubbling of potential crisis and embarrassment. Often a John Key shrug and grin deflected media criticism.

Under a NZ News Facebook article were numerous critical comments about John Key.

One wrote “I don’t know how many people thought he was awesome but I could only see a slippery businessman.”

Others criticised the media’s failure to hold Key to account. “Key’s failings were ignored mostly by the main stream media,” wrote another. Television interviewers balked at hard questioning.

His only probing interview was in England, in the BBC’s Hardtalk with Stephen Sakur over NZ’s false “100% pure, green image.”

Knighthood?

John Key was knighted in 2017 but many thought it made a mockery of the system.

One critic on Facebook said, “By the way, why did he get a knighthood? I mean really!

Then he jumped ship when the National so-called “party for the people” went down leaving his deputy Bill English to take a hit for him, an expendable scapegoat, while he stayed high and dry leaving his CV unblemished. To John Key, do the right thing – hand in your knighthood, your name should never be in the same level as great New Zealanders like Sir Edmund Hillary and Sir Colin Meads.”

An embarrassing legacy

Today, John Key’s legacy for the National Party should be seen as an embarrassment.

The consequences of Key’s policies and actions are very real: 

• A 2023 judicial review on the Urewera National Park found “twenty-nine huts were burned down in 2022 at the direction of Tūhoe’s post settlement entity Te Uru Taumatua following a decision by Te Urewera Board to decommission Department of Conservation (DOC) infrastructure within Te Urewera. The move was supported by the director-general of DOC.” 
• And as Karl du Fresne observed, “Pita Sharples sneaky trip to New York to sign the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples” did have very full implications that have deeply divided New Zealand’s society.
• Key’s handling of the economy was disastrous as journalist Graham Adams pointed out just in terms of greatly increased debt and in immigration and housing aspects.

His legacy to New Zealand is a poor one. Most of all, I deplored his disdain for democracy. One event that exemplifies it was the Key government’s take over in 2010 of the democratically elected Environment Canterbury council (ECan), a state control measure that continued for several years.

The ECan stink

What was the motive behind the broken promises and state control of ECan?

One can only surmise, but a number of critics put it down as opening the doors wide to further intensive development and expansion of irrigated corporate dairying, despite abnormally high nitrate levels in drinking water and waterways, in the latter case, highly toxic to aquatic life and detrimental to human health.

Going by a Danish study of 2.7 million people there is strongly suggested link between high nitrate levels in drinking water and bowel cancer. South Canterbury has one of the highest bowel cancer rates in the world.

“The whole saga of ECan stank like a hot steaming pile of cow dung,” observed one critic on Facebook.

Communist-Like?

Strangely the whole concept of state control by way of state takeover was so contrary to traditional National Party philosophy of less government, that it was almost “communistic” in its action.

The erosion of democracy was the big fundamental sin.

Amy Brooke in a book, said John Key by his “over-bearing ignoring of the over 85% of New Zealanders opposing the anti-smacking legislation,” still passed the bill into law. “A substantial number of National Party MPs” who did not support it were forced to go along with the bill’s passing.

The flawed Emissions Trading Scheme

John Key’s government gave birth to the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) a flawed move to combat the theoretical global warming scenario. The ETS allowed the bizarre trade-off for gross polluters to offset emissions by planting monocultures of pine trees while continuing to pollute.

Others were speculators, often overseas corporate syndicates, who swallowed up productive sheep and beef farms, to the detriment of food production and biodiversity and aggravating the environmental problem of wilding pines.

There were other poorly conceived laws passed such as “the watershed racist legislation of the Marine and Coastal Area Act” as Amy Brooke described it.

“Arguably more than any other previous government, Key’s National Party, with the continued activism of Treaty negotiations Minister Chris Finlayson, has underpinned the move to encourage a damaging pseudo-tribalism and racial handing over of coastal property and control rights to iwi,” said Amy Brooke.

Questions – in politics to satisfy his ego?

Was John Key only into politics to satisfy his own ego?

Did John Key have any principles above his own egotistical ambitions for power, to be prime minister and be awarded a knighthood?

Amy Brooke in “The 100 Days – Claiming Back New Zealand” gives some insight into the character of John Key.

“John Key has a gift for self-promotion, larded with a self-esteem which some would regard as close to vanity – and that personal charisma which makes him expert at a folksy, manipulative self-deprecation – plus that smarm-and-charm —and yet that phrase bestowed by (parliamentary) colleagues — “the smiling assassin.”

Democracy is precious and vital to our society and its future. Of course, in the end people can judge John Key’s legacy for themselves.

Tony Orman, once a town and country planner, is now a part-time journalist and author. This article was first published HERE