Third Time Lucky?

Praying for another chance? The current alignment of political constellations could hardly be more propitious for Winston Peters and NZ First to make it "third time lucky".

WINSTON PETERS, as the leader of NZ First, has twice received the Governor-General’s warrant: the first time from the National Party, the second time from Labour. On both occasions his ministerial sojourn ended badly.

With last week’s Roy Morgan poll registering an increase in NZ First support from 1 to 3 percent, many New Zealanders are now wondering whether, nineteen months hence, Peters will, for the third time, be asked to accept a ministerial warrant? And, will it be third time lucky?

Certainly, it is difficult to conceive of a conjunction of the political constellations more propitious for a Peters/NZ First comeback. Let’s just look at some of the issues which have already risen, or are rising, above the political horizon.

A Chinese business consortium at large in New Zealand, eyeing-up more than 100 Kiwi-owned dairy farms with a view to setting up a billion-dollar, vertically-integrated dairying operation in competition with this country’s single largest export-earner – Fonterra.

A Minister of Treaty Negotiations blithely conceding (to The Nation’s Duncan Garner) that, under the National-led Government’s proposed definition of Maori customary right, an iwi or hapu partnership-deal with Chinese interests seeking to invest $100 million in beach resorts holding a 100-year foreshore & seabed lease, would be subject only to the Resource Management Act and "other general pieces of legislation".

A "Whanau Ora" scheme promising to transfer hundreds-of-millions of dollars from publicly-administered and accountable welfare institutions to privately-owned, ethnically-driven providers (whose operations will be exempt from the scrutiny of the Official Information Act). A scheme which, Government reassurances notwithstanding, will operate according to a set of pre-modern cultural assumptions which most New Zealanders will neither accept nor endure. A scheme practically certain to detonate a sequence of financial and administrative explosions all the way from July 2010 to Election Day 2011.

A Government determined to intensify the consumption taxation of the poor so that it can attenuate the income taxation of the wealthy.

How could a politician of Peters’ skill and experience possibly fail to turn such a glittering array of political opportunities to his own and his party’s advantage?

In this regard, it’s leader’s electoral martyrdom and exile only works in favour of a NZ First comeback. Beyond the Beltway, and putting to one side those voters who have always experienced an allergic reaction to Peters’ political style, there are thousands of New Zealanders who, both at the time and with the benefit of hindsight, came to see the media-assisted crucifixion of the NZ First leader as not only an egregious misuse of media power, but also as a kind of modern-day show-trial designed to secure Peters’ absence from the new political environment the Key-led National Party was attempting to create.

Peters is the sworn enemy of the "neo-traditional tribal capitalists" National’s strategists have identified as a crucial element in the new combination of cultural and economic forces it believes will dominate the electoral politics of the 21st Century. NZ First’s absence from Parliament is crucial to making the ostensibly unlikely relationship between the National and the Maori parties politically durable.

Peters’ followers might not express the problem in quite those terms, but they know that his absence from Parliament is important – that it matters. They understand intuitively that over the past 17 months things have been done that could not have been done if Peters was still there.

NZ First’s return to Parliament would critically alter the balance of political forces, fundamentally weakening National’s grip on power. The inevitable attrition of the Government’s public support (already evident in the Roy Morgan poll) leaves Key dangerously exposed to a Peters-led crusade in 2011.

Rodney Hide’s super-city-inspired brutalisation of Auckland voters has compounded National’s difficulties. It places Act’s future in doubt – making Key utterly dependent on the Maori Party’s good-will. But, if Peters’ campaigning in the Maori seats threatens, even slightly, the Maori Party’s position, see how quickly that good-will evaporates!

What sort of platform would Peters and NZ First need to run on to make good that threat? And who should they target to garner five percent-plus of the Party Vote?

According to the American political scientist, Professor Jack H. Nagel, there are five salient socio-political "cleavages" around which an insurgent political party can be constructed in New Zealand: class; ethnicity; post-materialism; economic interventionism; religion and/or social conservatism.

At one time or another in its 17 year history, NZ First has sought to exploit nearly all of these categories. In 2010, however, with the ethnic and post-materialist cleavages already "taken" – by the Maori Party and the Greens respectively – NZ First is left with fewer "cleavages" to choose from. With Jim Anderton about to depart the political stage, Economic Interventionism is available, but Act’s David Garrett has already raised his party’s flag over Social Conservatism.

If Peters is really smart, however, he’ll focus on class – and one class in particular. Not Labour’s blue-collar, wage-earning working-class, but the class of self-employed and/or contract-dependent battlers which has grown like Topsy out of the wreckage of New Zealand’s once heavily-protected domestic economy.

Under enormous competitive pressure, resentful of those they see as the beneficiaries of "special privileges" and deeply suspicious of (or even overtly hostile to) immigrants of any kind, this classically petit-bourgeois, artisanal, "Waitakere Man" strata of society is ripe for the picking.

It encompasses not just the bloke who mows your lawns and the woman who styles your hair, but the share-milking couple despairing of ever being able to buy their own farm. You’ll find them in the heart of our big cities, but also in small provincial towns – and they constitute way more than five percent of the New Zealand electorate.

No one in NZ First understood this group better than the late Terry Heffernan. A very similar social strata had, after all, constituted the core of his original political home – Social Credit. The worst mistake Winston Peters ever made was choosing Michael Laws over Heffernan as his chief policy adviser in the run-up to the 1996 General Election. Laws turned NZ First into "National Lite" – a serious political blunder.

If Peters can re-capture in 2011 that curious mixture of patriotism, economic interventionism and progressive humanitarianism that Heffernan used to fuel NZ First’s assent of the opinion polls in the mid-1990s, then it’s possible, he just might, make it third time lucky.

This essay was originally published in The Independent of Thursday, 22 April 2010.