Labour's Hercules?

Hero? Saint? Both? Neither? In making Labour an electable proposition by 2017, Andrew Little faces a challenge of Herculean proportions. Then again, Hercules was presented with twelve impossible tasks. Little can succeed by successfully completing a more modest (but equally daunting) list of five.

 

 

AT 1:45PM ON TUESDAY AFTERNOON, Andrew Little, became the NZ Labour Party’s 15th leader. Mr Little faces a long and difficult struggle to restore Labour’s fortunes, a struggle that will only end when he has accomplished five Herculean tasks.

 

 

1. Rebuilding the relationship between Party and Caucus.

 

Helen Clark’s 15 year stint as party leader saw Labour’s decision-making processes concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. By the end of her reign practically every aspect of policy, and an unhealthy amount of influence over who should (and shouldn’t) be an MP, had become the exclusive preserve of the Leader, her Chief-of-Staff, and a handful of trusted caucus colleagues.

 

Since her departure, the Labour Party organisation has reclaimed much of the power that Clark wrested from it. In doing so, however, it has alarmed and infuriated many of the caucus’s “Old Guard”. They fear a return to the debilitating floor-fights that beset Labour Party conferences during the 1980s – when the rank-and-file, aided by the union affiliates, fought a bitter rear-guard action against the imposition of the far-right economic policies of Roger Douglas and his cronies.

 

Mr Little, using his authority as leader, needs to reassure both his caucus colleagues and the wider party organisation that free and frank policy debate is both a necessary and healthy part of political life on the Centre-Left. Any attempt to dragoon caucus members and rank-and-filers into toeing a rigid “party line” should be strenuously resisted.

 

 

2. Reaffirming Labour’s Core Beliefs

 

Labour’s pollster, Stephen Mills, has demonstrated that a clear plurality of New Zealanders believe that the state must continue to play a key role in the provision of such basic public services as health, education and housing; that governments have a duty to intervene in the economy to restore and/or enhance the life-chances of all citizens; and that New Zealand’s taxation system should be fair and progressive.

 

These are core Labour beliefs and they need to be repeated endlessly, both inside and outside Parliament, with a vehemence equal to the shibboleths of the ruthless, free-market ideology currently dominating New Zealand politics.

 

 

3. Shifting the Centre back to Labour.

 

The feckless fifth of New Zealand voters who refuse to identify themselves as either Left or Right habitually end up backing whichever party articulates its solutions to the country’s problems with the least equivocation and the most force. An effective Leader of the Opposition, by taking the lead and winning the arguments, can shift the ideological centre of gravity in his party’s favour. Conceived of as a coherent philosophical position, the “Centre” is a mirage which leads the insecure political leader far out into the desert – and then abandons him.

 

 

4. Learning to sell the unsaleable.

 

If visitors from the future had told the National or Labour politicians of the 1960s and 70s that in twenty years’ time their respective parties would both be preaching the laissez-faire economic policies of the nineteenth century they'd have laughed in their faces. And yet, by dint of ceaseless proselytising, and the relentless critiquing of their opponent’s policies and performance, the prophets of the “free market” succeeded in persuading a lamentably large number of the voters who’d benefited most from social-democracy that its institutions were broken and in urgent need of replacement.

 

Even today, as the world struggles to emerge from the Global Financial Crisis, the advocates of neoliberalism continue to insist that only more of the untrammelled greed and recklessness that got us into this mess, can get us out.

 

Mr Little, in addition to pointing out that the neoliberal emperor has no clothes, needs to demonstrate that Labour’s policy wardrobe is real, fashionable – and fits!

 

 

5. Being utterly unafraid of political talent: be it in Caucus or the wider party.

 

Mr Little must show the electorate that Labour has overcome the most important weakness of the Clark Era: its lamentable lack of succession planning. He must make it clear that, like Napoleon, he expects every Labour foot-soldier to carry a marshal’s baton in his knapsack.

 

If the public is to recover its faith in Labour as an alternative government, it must be able to see and have confidence in an aggressive and creative shadow cabinet.

 

 

Such are the tasks for Labour’s Hercules. Mr Little inherits a big agenda.

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 21 November 2014.

Trading in "Free" For "Fair"?

But Will Labour Make It? With David Cunliffe announcing the return of "Red Labour" following a rank-and-file instigated "revolution from below", the Party's 30-year adherence to the Neoliberal "free trade" ideology may be coming to an end.

LABOUR’S 30-YEAR COMMITMENT to “free trade” may be coming to an end. The test will be three weeks from now when the party gathers in Christchurch for its annual conference.

 

At last year’s conference, delegates were willing to offer only the most qualified support to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiations – and it required repeated interventions from former Trade Minister, Phil Goff, to secure even that limited endorsement. This time Mr Goff may not be so successful at fending off the TPP’s opponents.

 

Labour’s “Free-Traders” face some very substantial obstacles. The greatest of these is that the party’s commitment to trade liberalisation, like its commitment to the Reserve Bank Act, is emblematic of Labour’s 1980s embrace of Neoliberalism.

 

Throughout the 15-year reign of Helen Clark serious public criticism of these neoliberal shibboleths was verboten. Goff struggled (with limited success) to keep the ideological disputation in-house. David Shearer could not manage to do even that.

 

Had the news media paid a little more attention to the revolution that was taking place on the floor of last year’s annual conference at Ellerslie, and devoted a little less effort to chasing non-existent leadership challengers, they may have noticed the explicit repudiation of “Rogernomics” included in the 2012 Draft Policy Platform.

 

It is a measure of the intensity of the behind-the-scenes ideological battles that have been raging in the Labour Party since Ellerslie, that last year’s passionate condemnation of Rogernomics has been dropped from this year’s Draft Policy Platform.

 

How much of the document’s watering-down is attributable to the intervention of Grant Robertson, the preternaturally cautious chair of Labour’s policy council, is far from clear. But even in its new – and ultimately binding – iteration, the document registers an unmistakably leftward shift:

 

“Labour holds that government must play an essential role in managing and developing the economy. We reject the notion that free markets on their own will deliver either long-term prosperity or just distributional outcomes.”

 

When spoken by the new party leader, David Cunliffe, this is the sort of anti-neoliberal rhetoric that brings Labour’s newly empowered rank-and-file and affiliates to their feet a-whooping and a-hollering.

 

Considerably less inspiring is the Draft Policy Platform’s statement on international trade:

 

“Labour will support international trade and investment agreements that promote New Zealand’s economic wellbeing and support fairness, transparency, sovereignty, and sustainability.”

 

But even in this rather colourless sentence there’s more than enough to cause political problems for those caucus members determined to preserve the bipartisan consensus on free trade by backing the TPP.

 

Mr Cunliffe sent shockwaves through the trade liberalisation lobby even before he clinched the party leadership on 15 September; by warning that the TPP posed a “quite difficult and complex issue for New Zealand”.

 

His concern over such “fish hooks” as the future of Pharmac and the sovereignty-threatening potential of “investor/state disputes”, coupled with his doubts about the genuineness of the promised agricultural opportunities, must have made TPP boosters worry that Mr Cunliffe had just come from a briefing with Professor Jane Kelsey!

 

Small wonder then that business columnist, Fran O’Sullivan, whistling loudly in the dark, wrote glowingly of Mr Goff’s undimmed enthusiasm for a TPP agreement.

 

“Labour’s Phil Goff is back in business, adding his strong and rational voice to New Zealand's advocacy for the completion of the Trans Pacific Partnership.”

 

Like so many of her journalistic colleagues, Ms O’Sullivan has yet to grasp how fundamentally the rules of the political game have changed.

 

Mr Cunliffe and Labour’s rank-and-file are now locked in a radical embrace. If Labour’s new leader decides to consummate their “red wedding” by promoting “fair”, rather than “free” trade (which would ease Labour’s relationship with the Greens considerably) then there’s nothing Mr Goff, or the other fading Rogernomes of the broken ABC faction, can do about it.

 

Mr Cunliffe’s keynote speech to the Christchurch conference will undoubtedly make Labour’s new political trajectory much clearer. Expect to hear something on free trade. Just don’t expect it to be business as usual.

 

This essay was originally published in The Dominion Post, The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 11 October 2013.