Sitting This One Out: How Angry Abstainers Could Sink Labour and the Greens.

“It’s White Cis Males!” Greens co-leader Marama Davidson blithely alienates 33 percent of the voting public. The people who used to think of themselves as “left-wing” look at the causes Labour and the Greens have declared themselves to stand for and, very reluctantly, begin to weight the pros and cons of abstaining from voting altogether.

VOTER ABSTENTION should now be Labour’s and the Greens’ biggest fear. That tens-of-thousands of New Zealanders, normally supportive of these two parties, may simply choose to stay home on the 14 October and abstain from participating in the General Election altogether. Asked why they are considering this drastic course of action, why they are opting-out, the most common reply is: “Because there’s no one I can bring myself to vote for.”

The reasons for these voters turning away from Labour and the Greens are many and varied. Some are registering their displeasure at the way the Centre-Left parties responded to the challenge of the Omicron variant of Covid-19. Locating themselves, politically, among the 30 percent of New Zealanders who thought the anti-vaccination mandate protesters encamped on Parliament’s front lawn had a measure of right on their side.

Others may be planning to abstain in response to what some are calling the “Maorification” of New Zealand. The He Puapua Report, Three Waters, the whole “co-governance” project, may present an insurmountable hurdle to casting a vote for Labour and/or the Greens.

Not that the abstainers are considering voting for National or Act – not these “tribal” leftists. No matter how alienated they may feel from their traditional electoral options, there is simply no way they could ever cast a vote for “the class enemy”. Better not to vote at all.

Bolstering these groups considerably will be those women – and men – outraged at the treatment meted out by members and supporters of the transgender community to the British women’s rights activist Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull (a.k.a “Posie Parker”). Well-connected insiders are already reporting resignations – including a number of hard-working party organisers outraged by the scenes that unfolded in Auckland’s Albert Park on Saturday, 25 March 2023.

Their outrage has since been compounded by the apparent inability of senior Labour and Green parliamentarians to acknowledge their complicity in the whipping-up of a climate of toxic rage against Keen-Minshull and all those who accepted her invitation to publicly speak up for women’s rights.

Left-wingers who came of age between the 1970s and 90s find it increasingly difficult to relate to the “progressives” of the twenty-first century. They see activists who fought for women’s and gay rights (in a period of New Zealand history when there was strong societal resistance to both) demonised as “TERFs” by activists willing to tear apart an entire political culture over the question of who is, and who is not, a woman.

A fey mood of reckless radicalism appears to have gripped Labour and the Greens. The extraordinary charge levelled against “white cis men” by the Greens’ co-leader, Marama Davidson, declaring them responsible for all the violence in the world, epitomises the Traditional Left’s dilemma. Confronted with the Orwellian obligation to confirm that 2+2=5, or face excommunication from the progressive community, more and more of the people whose votes have kept the Greens in Parliament (and Labour in Government!) are simply saying “Fuck it!” – and walking away.

Undoubtedly, there will be some who will respond to this information with a tart “good riddance”. But those tempted to take this position should, perhaps, pause to consider the consequences of allowing so much electoral support to simply walk away.

Those perplexed and/or alienated by the actions of the Contemporary Left tend to be older voters. After all, if you can remember protesting the Vietnam War, the 1981 Springbok Tour and campaigning for the Homosexual Law Reform Bill, then you’re going to be well into your 50s – at least.

So what?

So, older supporters of the Left are among the most reliable of New Zealand voters. Their abstention will require Labour and the Greens to fill the gaps in the Left’s ranks with younger voters – the most difficult of all demographics to motivate electorally. While the ranks of the Right are replenished by middle-aged and elderly voters returning to the conservative fold after atypically backing “Jacinda” in 2020, the ranks of the Left will be thinned when those who, election after election, have proved themselves to be the Left’s most loyal and reliable voters, refuse to get off the couch.

There is even a worrying possibility that neither the Labour Party, nor the Greens, will see this electoral disaster coming. Left-wing abstainers are a politically astute group who, depending on how pissed-off they are with the parties they have traditionally supported, may flat-out lie to any pollster questioning them. If they refuse to answer honestly, then the looming threat they pose to the Government’s survival may not become apparent until it is too late to avert it.

Respondents lying to pollsters has been a vexing problem in the United Kingdom where “Shy Tories” pretending to be Labour loyalists have made electoral predictions increasingly problematic, and continues to bedevil psephology in the United States, where political polarisation is making people increasingly ill-disposed to co-operate with those they identify as the “enemy”. Such are the bitter fruits of political betrayals that never seem to end.

Sadly, New Zealanders are fast becoming familiar with their taste.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 31 March 2023.

Winning Joke: Why The Traditional Left Will Just Have To Live With Rainy-Day Robertson’s Disappointing Tax Policy.

Rainy-Day Man: Is Labour’s tax policy a disappointment? Of course it is! But it’s the best the Traditional Left is going to get. Why? because Labour’s pollsters are telling them that upwards of 200,000 women over the age of 45 years have shifted their allegiance from National to Labour. (Where else, FFS, does the traditional Left think Labour’s projected 50 percent-plus of the Party Vote has come from?!) 

EVEN IN the rapidly gentrifying Auckland suburb of Three Kings, the wailing of the Traditional Left was clearly audible. “Thirty-nine percent! Is that it? Even when, as you so helpfully point out, Grant, Australia’s top tax rate is 47 percent! Seriously, are you guys taking the piss? Is this some kind of joke?”

 Labour’s timid excuse for a tax policy (and, believe me, ‘timid’ is being kind!) will do almost nothing to address New Zealand’s outrageous social inequality. Inevitably, Rainy-Day Robertson’s latest disappointment will generate yet another, by now, entirely predictable call for “a new left-wing party”. Ageing lefties will proclaim the urgent need for a political force capable of occupying the political and electoral void which Labour has, for the past thirty years, been so loathe to fill.

 Once again, we will hear all about the 730,000 registered voters who failed to cast a ballot back in 2014, and be invited to consider how much more scope there must be in 2020 for a genuine party of the Left to vacuum-up their untapped support.

 The riposte to this argument is, as always, brutal in its unanswerability. Do those promoting “a new left-wing party” really believe that if close to 25 percent of registered voters were in any way accessible to a well-organised political force, such a force would not have arisen to translate their uncast votes into parliamentary seats? Hell! Are these folk seriously suggesting that if Labour could be convinced that all they needed to win over the fabled “missing million” voters were a handful of “progressive” policies, it wouldn’t be offering them a manifesto radical enough to make even Jeremy Corbyn blush? Of course they would!

 In fact, they’ve already given it a go.

 Has the Traditional Left forgotten Labour’s leftward policy shift following Helen Clark’s departure for New York City? Oh, sure, it wasn’t exactly “For the Many, Not the Few”, but it did include removing GST from fruit and vegetables; reforming the energy sector; restoring a useful measure of union power; as well as rock-solid opposition to John Key’s “partial privatisation” policies.

 Think of these promises, made in 2011 under the leadership of Phil Goff, as an experiment to determine whether a marginal shift to the left in policy would be answered by a marginal improvement in Labour’s vote. So, what happened?

 Well, as the late Jim Anderton used to say: “I’ve got news for you – and it’s all bad.” Labour’s Party Vote in 2008, after 9 years in office, was a pretty dismal 33.99 percent. Three years later, however, Labour’s Party Vote fell to 27.48 percent. Far from attracting the votes of the dispossessed and marginalised, Labour shed 181,944 of its most loyal supporters. It was the party’s worst showing in the popular vote for more than 80 years.

 And did those lost votes end up in the column of Hone Harawira’s and Sue Bradford’s “new left-wing party”, Mana? The latter’s manifesto was Corbynesque before Corbyn – as progressive a document as any traditional leftist could wish for. And yet, mysteriously, the arses of the dispossessed and marginalised remained firmly deposited on their couches. Mana attracted precisely 24,168 valid ballots: a princely 1.08 percent of the Party Vote.

 Those 730,000 votes – let alone a “Missing Million” of them! – just ain’t there, comrades. The people who could (and, God knows, who should) be casting them aren’t just lost to the Traditional Left, they are, in all but the most extraordinary circumstances, lost to the entire political process. Thirty years of neoliberalism have seen to that!

 Does the Covid-19 Pandemic qualify as an extraordinary circumstance? Well, it just might. But the Traditional Left can forget about exploiting it, because Billy Te Kahika Jr. is way ahead of them. It’s conspiracy theories, anti-science, and the crazed, visceral hatred of all things wise and gentle, that fills halls and attracts thousands of followers on social media in 2020 – not the woke fantasies of adolescent revolutionaries, or the dogma of superannuated Marxists.

 Not that Karl, himself, was in any doubt about the revolutionary potential of what he called the lumpenproletariat. A quick squiz at his The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis-Napoleon makes it clear that the father of Marxism regarded people as dispossessed and marginalised as the hardcore Parisian poor as being available only to political charlatans and demagogues. This is how he described the men who rose to power on the shoulders of that quintessential political charlatan and demagogue, Charles Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte (1808-1873):

 “At the court, in the ministries, at the head of the administration and the army, a gang of blokes of whom the best that can be said is that one does not know whence they come — these noisy, disreputable, rapacious bohemians who crawl into gallooned coats with the same grotesque dignity as the high dignitaries of Soulouque — elbow their way forward.”

 “[N]oisy, disreputable, rapacious bohemians”: if that’s not a perfect pen portrait of Jami-Lee Ross and Billy TK, then I don’t know what is!

 Is Labour’s tax policy a disappointment? Of course it is! But it’s the best the Traditional Left is going to get. Why? because Labour’s pollsters are telling them that upwards of 200,000 women over the age of 45 years have shifted their allegiance from National to Labour. (Where else, FFS, does the Traditional Left think Labour’s projected 50 percent-plus of the Party Vote has come from?!)

 A great many of these women will be well-heeled matrons of the middle-class who think Jacinda’s just so wonderful! Still more will be the wives, sisters and daughters of “Waitakere Men” – upwardly-mobile members of the skilled working-class. (The SUV-driving relations of those small-business-owning “tradies” who made the introduction of Labour’s Capital Gains Tax politically impossible.) These voters (and that’s the key factor in this whole electoral equation, isn’t it, these Kiwis actually vote) are doing well, but not so well that they’re going to be caught by a tax which only kicks-in when your salary tops $180,000.

 In the immortal words of Vic Deakins (played by John Travolta) in the 1996 movie, Broken Arrow:

 “Fuck ‘em, if they can’t take a joke.”

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 10 September 2020.