The John Keys v the donkeys

FROM THE LEFT - CHRIS TROTTER

Would I call it an epiphany?

Maybe. It was certainly one of those moments when the tight knots of emotion loosen and clarity replaces confusion.

It happened during the prizegiving ceremony at my daughter's school. And it showed me the enormous power of the word that is so often associated with our new prime minister: aspiration.

As I watched the cavalcade of secondary school pupils receive their prizes, and heard all around me the happy murmuring of proud parents, a lifetime's worth of hostility towards these sorts of ceremonies melted away.

All my life I have given thought only to those with no hope of receiving the glittering prizes. Even when (very occasionally) I received one myself, I could not help feeling that tug of guilt; that blush of embarrassment at being distinguished from my peers.

The socialist in me would rehearse all the reasons why I should reject such baubles. What chance does a kid from a working-class family have in a competition for academic distinction? Where are the shelves of books? The family connections? The universally positive middleclass expectations in which these high-achievers are cradled from the day they are born?

How can a kid raised among the stark, bare walls of a state house hope to compete with a kid who has grown up with Beethoven and Bach, Rembrandt and Brueghel?

But as I watched the prizewinners make their way across the stage, it suddenly hit me that this attitude was both extraordinarily arrogant, and very, very dangerous.

For one thing, a great many of these prizewinners were the children of immigrants.

Wrenched away from their homelands; required to learn a whole new language; subjected to grotesque racial stereotyping and often outright verbal and physical abuse; these children, backed by their families, have never wavered in their quest for academic, sporting and cultural excellence.

Who is served by belittling, or condemning, the distinctions conferred upon these children? Who is served by an ideology that refuses to recognise that crucial aspect of the human spirit which refuses to accept the brute statistical reality that many are called but few are chosen?

Are we socialists, in our drive for an absolute equality of outcomes, really willing to descend to the level of a certain species of crab which will, when collected in a bucket, seize and haul back into the doomed mass any individual that attempts to escape its fate by climbing out?

Should John Key's mother be condemned for instilling in her son the notion that, with lots of hard work and a little luck, he could transcend his state house roots?

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Is that why so many other New Zealanders raised in state houses voted against Helen Clark's Labour-led government last Saturday?

Because, somehow, they had got it into their heads that she would be happier if they never left them? Never climbed out of the bucket?

Or, God forbid, that Labour's social-democratic state was actually about seizing them in its claws and dragging them back down into it?

Labour has to understand that its state houses, and the welfare state that built them, was just the first, not the last, stage and crowning achievement of the socialist journey. Social democracy must never be about maintaining vast swaths of the population in perpetual electoral peonage.

State houses, along with our public health and education services, must be regarded as launching-pads for heroes, not stables for Labour's donkey-vote.

For, as we have seen, "donkeys", too, have aspirations. Twenty years ago, at a New-Labour Party conference in Christchurch, a laid-off railway worker delivered one of the most impassioned speeches I have ever heard. Holding up his two hands, he told the audience: "These are all I have - give them something to do."

But he was wrong. He had a brain as well as two strong hands. And, through a combination of lots of hard work and a little luck, he became a highly skilled computer specialist, and the creator of his own successful business.

As the last rays of Tuesday's sun illuminated the interior of Mt Roskill Grammar School's assembly hall, it lit up the faces of the 500 New Zealanders, old and new, who had risen to sing the national anthem.

And as we asked God to defend our free land, I couldn't help wondering how that former railway-worker voted on Saturday.

 

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