Take Your Partners

Come Dancing: Labour entered its Third Term Electoral Ball on the arm of the poor, and then proceeded to dance with every other girl in the room. It didn't get invited to a fourth.

"DANCE with the one you came with." That’s what I told Helen Clark (via Radio New Zealand) the morning after the 2005 election. Labour had been saved by the votes of the poor: state house tenants, beneficiaries, low-paid workers of every colour and creed – but most particularly Pasifika and Maori New Zealanders living in South Auckland.

Helen Clark arrived at the Third Term Ball with the poor on her arm. It was their needs and their values that her government was, strategically speaking, bound to serve for the next three years. If Labour neglected the partner whose ticket had got them into their third electoral ball, it would not be attending a fourth.

But, as everybody knows, Labour couldn’t dump its date fast enough. No sooner was it safely through the door than the party was back among the same old crowd: free-traders, welfare incentivists, tax-cutters and anti-smackers.

The swingeing benefit cuts imposed by Ruth Richardson’s "Mother of All Budgets" remained in place – along with the desperate child poverty they’d institutionalised. Manufacturing industry, and the jobs it created, continued to be driven off-shore. The already parlous condition of the State’s housing stock was allowed to fall into headline-grabbing squalor. And then, to add one last, deeply resented, cultural insult to all these class injuries, Labour decided to back Sue Bradford’s "anti-smacking" bill.

Not only had Labour failed to dance with the girl it came with, the Party had forced her to sit and watch while it danced with every other girl in the room.

Three years later the Poor got their own back. Not by teaming up with someone new, but by refusing to buy Labour a ticket. In 2008, the impoverished voters from the other side of town – the social democrats’ perennial and shamelessly neglected date – simply stayed at home. It was the crucial abstention of these tens of thousands of disillusioned and angry New Zealanders that sealed Labour’s fate, and made possible a new government.

So, on whose ticket did John Key gain entry to the dance-hall? What sort of partner did the National Party bring to its first First Term Ball in eighteen years?

If we look at the election data for the 2005 general election, we find that National had rallied practically the whole of the traditional right-wing vote to its side. With one or two lonely exceptions, the provincial towns and cities voted solidly for National. Outside of the provinces, however, National’s pickings were slim. It’s 21 seat gain over the disaster of 2002 came largely at the expense of other right-wing parties. To win in 2008, National had to break Labour’s grip on the mixed metropolitan suburbs.

The voter escorting National to its First Term Ball turned out to be the sort of bloke who spends Saturday afternoon knocking-back a few beers on the deck he’d built himself, and Saturday evening watching footy with his mates on the massive flat-screen plasma-TV he’s still paying-off.

His missus works part-time to help out with the mortgage, and to keep their school-age offspring in cell-phones and computer games.

National’s partner – let’s call him Waitakere Man – has a trade certificate that earns him much more than most university degrees. He’s nothing but contempt for "smart-arse intellectual bastards spouting politically-correct bullshit".

What he owns, he’s earned – and means to keep.

"The best thing we could do for this country, apart from ditching that bitch in Wellington and making John Key prime-minister," he’d inform his drinking-buddies in the lead-up to the 2008 election "would be to police the liberals – and liberate the police."

Waitakere Man values highly those parts of the welfare state that he and his family use – like the public education and health systems – but has no time at all for "welfare bludgers".

"Get those lazy buggers off the benefit", he’s constantly telling his wife, "and the government would be able to give us a really decent tax-cut."

On racial issues he’s conflicted. Some of his best friends really are Maori – and he usually agrees with the things John Tamihere says on Radio Live. So long as the conversation stays on sport, property prices and fishing, he doesn’t really notice the colour of a bloke’s skin. It’s only when the discussion veers towards politics, and his Maori mates start teasing him about taking back the country, treaty settlement by treaty settlement, that his jaw tightens and he subsides into sullen silence. Though he didn’t say so openly at the time, he’d been thrilled by Don Brash’s Orewa Speech, and reckoned the Nats’ "Iwi-Kiwi" billboards were "bloody brilliant!"

Winning over Waitakere Man turned out to be a great "twofer" deal for the Right. To its immense satisfaction, the highly-skilled, upwardly-mobile working-class blokes who began trooping into National’s camp following the 2005 election were bringing their wives with them.

The "gender gap", which had for so long worked in Helen Clark’s favour, was closing. Where Brash’s unflinching neoliberal austerity had turned women off, Key’s boyish charm and his "aspirational", "Labour-lite" polices were turning them on.

National was getting two (or more) votes for the price of one. Sometimes Waitakere Man brought with him the votes of his mother, daughters, sisters, aunts and nieces as well. How had Clark forfeited the trust of Waitakere Woman?

Between 1999 and 2005 working-class women took pride in Clark’s political success, and responded positively to the introduction of Paid Parental Leave and Working for Families. They’d admired her decision to stay out of Iraq, and had, by-and-large, been relieved when she spurned the Greens for Peter Dunne.

What broke their connection with Clark was the anti-smacking legislation. They felt affronted – as if their parenting skills had been weighed in the balance of the Prime Minister’s conscience and found wanting. Clark, who had no children, was telling them how to raise their kids. She seemed to be passing judgement on their whole family – turning them into criminals. They felt betrayed.

Waitakere Woman’s sense of betrayal, combined with the ingrained misogyny and cultural diffidence of Waitakere Man, was what got National onto the dance floor in 2008. Key should read both Rodney Hide’s intransigence on Maori representation, and the recent Referendum’s unequivocal result, as timely reminders of the price of his party’s admission.

When the band begins to play, Waitakere Man and Waitakere Woman must not be left standing.

This essay was originally published in The Independent of Thursday, 3 September 2009.