WHEN VERITY MET GERRY

 

Stuff columnist Verity Johnson got a call from the Speaker of the House, Gerry Brownlee. He's worried about some of the things that Verity has been saying…

VERITY JOHNSON has become, almost accidentally, one of the few mainstream commentators, to say out loud what most New Zealanders mutter under their breath. Her columns for Stuff have struck a nerve not because she offers a grand ideological alternative, or a fully-fledged critique of late-stage capitalism but because she articulates—plainly, impatiently, sometimes caustically, the sense that the country is drifting, leaderless, and exhausted. She has caught the mood of a public that no longer believes the political class has any idea what it is doing.

Her liberal instincts haven’t prevented her from reaching a conclusion that many on the left arrived at long ago: Labour has nothing to offer. Not nothing new—just nothing at all. After six years in government and two years in opposition, the party that once claimed to represent working people has managed to present itself as a slightly more apologetic manager of the same economic model that has failed those people for decades. Johnson’s frustration is not abstract. She lists the symptoms of a country in decline with the bluntness of someone who has run out of patience: a fuel crisis, one in three Kiwis facing food insecurity, 200 people leaving the country every day, hardship withdrawals from KiwiSaver at record highs, and a social fabric so thin it tears at the slightest pressure. And Labour, she writes, has spent “two years out back having a blueberry vape.”

It is not the language of a socialist, but it is the language of someone who has stopped believing in the fairy tale that swapping one set of managers for another will fix anything. Johnson, a small business owner, is not offering a structural critique of capitalism, but she is refusing to indulge the fantasy that the system is fundamentally sound and merely requires a different pilot. Her argument is simpler: the machine is broken, and none of the parties operating it seem to know what to do about it.

That, apparently, was enough to alarm Gerry Brownlee. The former National cabinet minister and current Speaker of the House has been reading Johnson’s columns closely enough to pick up the phone. His concern, he told her, was that young people were becoming disillusioned—not just with the parties, but with the system itself. He worried that this disillusionment could lead to “extremism.” It is telling that what finally jolted a senior figure of the political establishment into action was not poverty, not inequality, not the exodus of New Zealanders, but the possibility that people might stop believing in the legitimacy of the political order.

Brownlee invited Johnson to Parliament for Budget week, hoping that a behind-the-scenes look at the machinery of government might restore her faith. It is a curious assumption: that proximity to the cogs and levers of the system would somehow make its failures more forgivable. Johnson’s complaint is not that she doesn’t understand how Parliament works; it is that she understands all too well that it no longer works for most people.

Predictably, the visit did not have the rehabilitative effect Brownlee hoped for. If anything, it confirmed Johnson's worst suspicions. She describes the spectacle with a mixture of disbelief and despair: the bickering, the petty insults, the absence of serious economic debate, the venting of feelings in place of analysis, and the total lack of any heavyweight critique of why the country is in crisis or how to get out of it.

Johnson is generous enough to acknowledge Brownlee’s civility and his willingness to engage with someone who disagrees with him. But politeness does not compensate for political bankruptcy. Brownlee remains a representative of a political order that most New Zealanders—Johnson included—no longer believe can deliver anything resembling a better future. His appeal for faith in the system is precisely the problem. Faith is what politicians ask for when they have run out of arguments.

The deeper issue Johnson identifies, even if she does not frame it in ideological terms, is that New Zealand’s political system has reached the end of its imaginative capacity. The parties are not merely uninspiring; they are intellectually spent. They tinker with the settings of an economic model that has produced inequality, insecurity, and stagnation, and then express surprise when the public grows cynical. They warn of “extremism” whenever people question the status quo, as though the real danger lies not in the crises themselves but in the refusal to politely endure them.

What Johnson’s columns reveal—perhaps unintentionally—is that the crisis is not just economic or political but existential. People no longer believe that the system can fix the problems it created. They no longer believe that the parties are capable of offering anything beyond managerialism. And they no longer believe that voting for “the other lot” will make any meaningful difference to their lives.

Brownlee’s invitation to Parliament was meant to reassure Johnson. Instead, it probably confirmed for her that the political class is trapped in its own rituals, unable to grasp the scale of the disillusionment outside the chamber. The answer to that disillusionment, of course, is not to restore faith in a system that lurches from crisis to crisis, but to recognise that systems are human creations—and therefore can be changed.

Verity Johnson may not be offering a socialist analysis, but she is articulating something that resonates far beyond her own ideological boundaries: the sense that New Zealand cannot keep doing what it has been doing. The public is not turning away from politics; politics has turned away from the public. And the first step toward renewal is not faith in the old machinery, but faith in our collective ability to build something better.