The dangerous game of empathy politics

When you play the empathy card, it pays to be aware of the consequences.

Politicians use empathy when the media are covering disasters, both natural and man-made.

Prime Minister John Key is a devoted player, such as when he attended the funeral of a New Zealand soldier killed in Afghanistan rather than rescue a free trade deal with the rich Gulf oil nations.

He told victims of the Canterbury earthquake they would looked after and made similar pledges to the families of the miners killed at Pike River.

Now those promises are coming back to haunt him. The earthquake recovery in Christchurch has been more ineffectual than expected, with dissatisfaction being expressed on a daily basis in the local media.

Mr Key put his deputy in charge and the result, by all accounts, has not worked out as well as it might than if run by a professional commissioner.

By contrast, Australia appointed a top-level board of business advisers to the Queensland floods recovery operation, because they are more likely to get the job done better than politicians or bureaucrats.

At Pike River, the media have latched on to a constant flow of criticism, mainly over the recovery of the miners’ remains. It was only this week the receivers were finally able to spell out the future as they saw it.

Rather than take so long to reach this conclusion, a less empathetic response would have been to put out the facts about the effects of the explosion, the gas levels and safety issues as fast as possible, instead of creating false hopes for those most affected by the tragedy.

Who spiked Pike River?
The media keep covering the Pike River disaster because victims of tragedy make better news than facing hard facts. Investigate editor Ian Wishart has asked questions that have yet to be raised elsewhere, let alone answered.

Wishart compares the Pike River explosion with official reports into other similar explosions, particularly in the US, where mines were entered only hours after explosions to find survivors.

At Pike River, police were put in charge and applied precautionary principles that have been blamed by some as being too risk-averse. But, as hindsight suggests, the dangerous state of the mine should have been made clearer from the start.

Wishart points out that despite the extensive media coverage, the company has never revealed the deadly gas levels. He also makes the shocking claim that the monitoring sensors, on which the company depended for its safety procedures, were capable of being disabled by mine workers.

This was done by applying chewing gum or blowing air over the sensors to prevent a shut down, which would have meant lost income for contractors. Wishart’s tipoff is backed up by an ex-miner’s quote in the Timaru Herald and an interview with Andrew Little, the union leader.

The decision to pull the police out of Pike River after nearly two months came just a day or two after the Dominion Post questioned why the operation had gone on for so long with nothing to show for it.

The reason, of course, was that no one in authority would admit the futility of the exercise. Mr Key himself has finally had to do that, amid charges by the media he was breaking his pledges (which he was).

Mr Key has made several other pledges – on national super, welfare payments and student loans – that are putting the country billions in debt. The price of misplaced empathy can be high, indeed.

Inflation as a cure
It is rare in the world of institutional investing to hear more than platitudes aimed at a public that shows disdain for understanding even the basics of prudent investment.

Tower Investments chief executive Sam Stubbs has made a welcome exception, by launching a series of quarterly briefings for the media.

The first generated plenty of copy, as he forecast rising inflation and urged people to buy residential property as a hedge.

Financial assets, such as cash and bonds, would suffer most in the coming year – places where many KiwiSaver funds are heavily invested – as the appetite for risk was rising and unlikely to reverse.

Mr Stubbs pointed out countries with heavy debt – which is virtually all except China – would benefit from a dose of inflation and that central banks would likely turn a blind eye.

Lenders, he argued, would pay a heavier price as their assets declined, while canny investors should head for stocks, commodities and property where inflation does less damage to value.

Mr Stubbs revealed Tower, as a default KiwiSaver provider, was finally making money out the scheme, and that “ we are net investors [in the sharemarket] every week.”

This is good for other share buyers. Institutional investors can only buy large and liquid stocks, whose prices are likely to firm and lead the minnows up. That leaves plenty of room for private buyers. A glance at last year’s winners and losers points the way.

Overdue march to freedom
The Arab world may be on the verge of long-overdue change that has roiled eastern Europe since the collapse of communism and has also brought democracy to most of South America and greater parts of Asia and Africa.

No one is holding their breath over events in Tunisia, where a popular revolt for the first time in modern Aran history has thrown out a kleptomaniac despot.

The timing was embarrassing for other Arab leaders, whose grip on power may be just as tenuous in the face of a determined population. (President Ben Ali fled to Saudia Arabia last weekend after 23 years’ hard-line rule.)

An Arab economic summit, meeting in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el Sheik, Egypt, this week, heard an insider warn that “the Arab soul is broken by poverty, unemployment and general recession.”

The speaker was Amr Moussa, the secretary general of the Arab League and a former foreign minister in Egypt. In his opening remarks, quoted by the Associated Press, he continued:

“The Tunisian revolution is not far from us, The Arab citizen entered an unprecedented state of anger and frustration.”

Egyptian authorities apparently tried to get Mr Moussa to avoid discussion of Tunisia, where events remain fluid. Protesters are still turning out in Tunis, demanding that allies of the ousted president stop clinging to power, while newly appointed ministers have resigned within 24 hours.

Thanks to the rise of radical Islam as the leading opposition Arab despotism, the influence of the West has declined, according to commentator Fouad Ajami. Tunisia’s absence of Islamist extremists may be its best hope of embracing democracy.