Behind the Scenes #5 - Policies

In the past couple of weeks, here in NZ there’s been a whole lotta love, no wait, the opposite - what’s that, hate? - for a couple of politicians who were previously seen as being of multiple opposite sides of the political polygon, but have spent the last year in coalition - for reasons unknown to themselves.

Or for power. Take your pick.

Thing is, I had respect for at least one of them up until this week. Background alert: this part may bore non-New Zealanders. Feel free to skip to the next paragraph or 16 - promise, I will get to the song at hand eventually. It does relate.

Anyway, I like Hone Harawira, and though I’ve not always agreed with his politics, since he came and spoke to us students on our overnight marae trip on my grad-dip journalism course (part of which I skipped for a gig), I’ve appreciated his candour and way with a word and situation; until now.

Turns out the motherfucker - to paraphrase Harawira himself - is a wacko racist. Sure, I should have been ticked off by fact he is in the race-based Maori Party, but he struck me as someone who could transcend that crap and actually say it like it is, on behalf of the left.

As we all (in NZ) now know, he took a detour whilst on one of those random overseas missions no one actually knows or cares about until a politician fucks up. His fuckup was taking his wife on a sightseeing tour of Paris whilst he was meant to be in some apparently un-sightseeing-worthy Belgian town - Brussels, I think. Turns out he paid for that part of his trip himself, and by his own account, he’d done his business the night before, or something. Like he operates in some kind of freaky world where race-based electorate MPs from obscure Pacific countries get to meet the world’s playmakers at some kind of pre-ball party and knock out the real arrangements, leaving the formalities to nerds like the UK and shit.

So far, so meh. But when he got back, instead of arguing his case - what he did was within the law, he’d done his work already, it was fully legal according to the rules and fuck, if you were in a day’s drive of Paris and hadn’t been, wouldn’t you go? - he accused “white motherfuckers” of I don’t know, ‘uckin’ with his shit. I wish I was, but I’m not kidding.

The whole puritanical bullshit argument he tried might have flown in the 19th century, but it’s 2009.

As for Rodney Hide, the irony precedes itself, surely. But think about it - Rodney Hide is pretty much capitalism incarnate, so the fact he’s raping the public purse without remorse (to paraphrase, “I disagree with these perks, but I’m not a martyr”) and thinks he is entitled to it, I’m guessing through his own interpretation of virtue, shouldn’t really surprise anyone.

Sooo - to the song at hand, Policies. Written in its initial form over Nov/Dec 1999.

I suppose it’s odd that it starts with an apparent grammatical error - but no, it’s just a possessive. ‘Policies are all’ would have been acceptable, but the word ‘policy’ fits, okay? Not that I’ve been asked about it very often.

New Zealand had a general election in November 1999, a year throughout which I’d developed my songwriting and political idealogy to a degree, I guess. We’d had a right-wing govt for nine years, and the election result was a foregone conclusion. Helen Clark’s Labour won, but as us young’uns are wont to do, we soon imagined cracks.

To be honest, I’m not sure what cracks I could have seen that quickly, despite the lyrics. I was yet to endeavor on proper student protest (that would come in 2000) and Labour’s victory was something I’d awaited since 1990.

The ‘no party vote’ lyric I suppose is the most interesting part. The reasoning was at the time, we’re so young, we don’t have a party we’re loyal to (we get two votes in NZ - one for an electorate, which is nigh on useless, and one for the party, which decides the government). It was a very fresh idea at the time, the separate party vote, and it has fallen in recent years to the same kind of political manipulation as the old meaningless electorate vote used to be prey to.

The electorate vote is still almost entirely useless, but seems to hold a spell over much of the electorate who want a return to the bad old days.

I can’t say much more about the original lyric, but its message seems as timely as ever - listen to the distinct messages each party sends, as opposed to their stated policies. And judge them on those.

Sound and structure-wise, the song has remained remarkably intact since it was first written. A few synths were added, replacing what were originally guitars, but apart from that, what’s on the album is pretty much what was on the demo I recorded in 1999.

LINK: DOWNLOAD ‘POLICIES’

Mirrored from Radio Over Moscow.