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Sharma’s mistake was to think Labour cared

PR consultant and commentator, formerly worked for the National Party Ben Thomas

Hard on the heels of the salacious tales of new National MP Sam Uffindell’s teenaged career as a school bully, Labour member Gaurav Sharma’s explosive claims about bullying by his party hierarchy seemed poised to illuminate something important about present-day abuses in the halls of power.

However, if a night-time dormitory hazing is readily identifiable as bullying, even a week later it’s not obvious what the public is supposed to make of the Sharma claims. At dizzying speed, he accused Labour’s whips and leadership of bullying (aided and abetted by Parliamentary Service), and was then accused of bullying his own staff.

One of his alleged victims told media they cried frequently and Sharma ‘‘couldn’t process my emotion and didn’t want to deal with it’’, which may not have shed much light on events but certainly stands out as a uniquely Gen Z formulation of the role and duties of an employer.

The affair reached its nadir, at least as an exploration of Parliament’s post-Francis report preoccupation with self-victimisation, when Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern explained that a meeting of the entire Labour caucus except Sharma was not a stitch-up of the errant MP but a ‘‘safe space’’ for his 62 colleagues, including the country’s most powerful political figures and his alleged persecutors, to talk about him in his absence.

The irony, of course, is that the prime minister, characteristically empathetic throughout, has never failed to express her personal concern for Sharma and ‘‘his wellbeing’’, in the same way a mobster might fret that it would be a real shame if something were to happen to a local shopkeeper who hadn’t paid protection money.

Ardern maintains there is no real argument about the facts of Sharma’s long-running dispute with party figures, especially former whip Kieran McAnulty, only about how they should be interpreted.

There is no doubt Sharma has felt unfairly victimised by the party’s internal disciplines, and there is no doubt that, after the die was cast last

Thursday, his party has set out to defang and then destroy him. If there is a salient difference between what he had earlier experienced and ‘‘real’’ bullying, it will be obvious to Sharma now. The real difference in interpretation here – one that plays out in the wider discourse of parliamentary culture and cultural change – is how much exactly Gaurav Sharma matters as far as his party is concerned.

Sharma’s social media posts often returned to the chafing feeling of not having autonomy as an elected member of Parliament; of the ignominy of losing control of staff hiring and management, even in the face of (it is implied) incompetence. What’s unusual about Sharma is that his alienation from the grinding tedium and limbo of life as a government backbencher seems to be not the result of ‘‘do you know who I am’’ egotism of frustrated ambition but the opposite – an almost complete indifference to a political career and lack of understanding of internal discipline and convention.

Labour’s 2020 ‘‘red tide’’, which dashed many National MPs’ careers on the harsh rocks of defeat, washed the unsuspecting Sharma up on the shores of Parliament on an unlikely electorate win. He may as well have been transported to the wonderful land of Oz, so unfamiliar was it to him.

See his no doubt sincere whistleblowing on another MP’s ‘‘misuse’’ of funds, which turned out to be business as usual for the hardworking taxpayers’ dollar. If Sharma is guilty of anything, it is seeing the alternate reality of political life through the eyes of an ordinary person.

If Sharma is guilty of anything, it is seeing the alternate reality of political life through the eyes of an ordinary person.

‘Politics is a team game,’’ my former (very rigorous, resolutely non-bullying) boss Chris Finlayson said at the launch of his new book, Yes Minister, this week. And the developing culture clash at Parliament is now one of the collective (as Ardern said, ‘‘the team’’) versus individual interests, whether of staff or MPs.

Former ACT leader Richard Prebble used to deflect criticism of his MPs’ often-contradictory positions on policy and interpersonal issues by saying it was ‘‘the party of the individual’’; a selffulfilling prophecy as, beset by scandals, ACT was reduced to an individual MP between 2011 and 2020.

Now, however, the party of the individual is flourishing, with record high polling. And that’s at least in part because its 10-person caucus, led by David Seymour and deputy Brooke van Velden, has demonstrated the tightest cohesion and best discipline of any party since the election.

Just as economist Adam Smith described the miraculous functioning of free markets as seeming to work as if directed by an invisible hand, so too is the functioning of political parties. But in politics, even if it’s hidden, the hand is really there, and if you force it into the public eye it will usually appear as a fist.

Opinion

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2022-08-18T07:00:00.0000000Z

2022-08-18T07:00:00.0000000Z

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