Jacinda Ardern thinks MPs can ‘shift the dial’ – but is it too late?

OPINION: Once the smoke is cleared, the Jami-Lee Ross saga may provoke some soul searching among MPs about whether his plight is a symptom of the adversarial style of politics that we have in New Zealand.

But for now that seems like a forlorn hope.

On National’s side, there is still too much anger at the way some of its MPs’ personal lives have been dragged into the public arena for that reflection to take place. 

And on Labour’s side, the turmoil in National’ ranks is pure opportunity.

Talking to Stuff this morning, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said she believed MPs could change and that Parliament could “shift the dial”.

She believed that change was underway with the way Labour had responded to the Jami-Lee Ross crisis.

“The message I gave my team is these aren’t matters for us. These are not issues we should be commenting on and we haven’t.

“I don’t think the public are particularly interested in seeing us as politicians engaged in [these matters]. “

But Ardern would say that.

There is no upside in Labour joining the fray. But there is political opportunity in rising above it.

The public have always been turned off by personality politics and the adversarial nature of political debate in politics.

But that has not stopped politics becoming increasingly personal and tribal.

Labour’s hands are hardly clean on that score. During the Don Brash years, politics got personal when Labour made an interjection in Parliament that sparked a caucus showdown over an alleged affair.

The Jami-Lee Ross saga is a different league again; the former National Party whip has dished the dirt on his own colleagues with secret recordings and texts exposing MPs’ personal lives.

Some of the texts are so personal they have not been published.

Ross may be a one-off but it has opened a Pandora’s box.

No one is sure if it is the natural progression of a  Westminster-style of politics which has long been combative and adversarial in nature and where name calling and insults are common place. 

That is, after all, why they call Parliament’s debating chamber the bear pit.

Ardern says Labour has not got enough credit for sticking to policy issues “despite there being a tumultuous environment around us”.

“That’s unusual. In my time in opposition, anything happening to us was bought into the house and thrown around just as much as in the media.”

But she knows that voters would not reward Labour for using the Jami-Lee Ross saga to score political points. When politics gets ugly, the public have long taken the view that it is “a plague on all their houses”.

That was largely reflected in last night’s One News-Colmar Brunton poll showing National largely unscathed from the scandal.

National leader Simon Bridges had taken the biggest hit, probably over his handling of the issue, which has resembled a rapidly accelerating train wreck from the day he ordered an inquiry into a leak of his travel expenses.

The tragedy for National is that Bridges initially ordered the inquiry because he was supremely confident the culprit would be found either in Labour or the Speaker’s office.

Yet it was always more likely to be an internal leak given the number of National Party MPs and staffers who had access to the information.

That Bridges was more willing to believe in the leak as dirty political tactics by his opponents, rather than internal party machinations, is a sign of the extent to which trust between the two major political parties has sunk.

We are nowhere near the point we saw in the last US election thankfully, when the debate between the two major parties was visceral and ugly.

And Ardern may be right that the Jami-Lee Ross saga is a turning point here.

But the smoke has far from settled on which way it will turn.