"Act Two"

Location, location, location: If Act could reposition itself in a spot more congenial to the New Zealand voter, it might just have a chance of surviving its present identity crisis.

HAS ACT lost its soul – as political scientist Bryce Edwards suggests? Or can its present troubles be traced to a series of major strategic blunders dating all the way back to the formation of the Association of Consumers and Taxpayers in the early 1990s?

If it’s the former, then there’s no hope of recovery, and Act will soon be joining what’s left of the Alliance in Oblivion’s waiting-room.

But, if it’s the latter, then there is still a chance (a very small one, admittedly) that the Act Party can recover.

Strategic errors tend to be cumulative, with every mistake driving you closer to the brink of disaster. But, so long as there is a way of escaping the worst effects of your errors, and the possibility of rebuilding your strength, catastrophe can be avoided.

Just think of Mao Zedong and his Communist comrades in the grim autumn of 1934. A lengthy series of disastrous political decisions and military blunders had left them confronting what appeared to be certain disaster. The Nationalist armies of Chiang Kai-shek were closing in on their positions and the general consensus among foreign observers (even the Russians) was that the Reds were finished in China.

But then Mao set out on his famous "Long March" – leading his troops out of the trap the Nationalists’ had set and embarking on an epic trek of many thousands of miles to a new base in the north-west of the country. It was here, in the city of Yan'an, in Shaanxi Province, that the Communist Party reconstituted itself as a new, peasant-based movement, and Mao's exhausted troops became the core of a new People’s Liberation Army – the unstoppable peasant force which finally defeated Chiang’s Nationalists in 1949.

Act’s original strategic error, the one from which it has never truly recovered, and which led inexorably to all the other errors, was allowing its political enemies to cast it as an ideological party of the far-right. The moment that identity was pinned on its back it was doomed to remain on the fringe of New Zealand politics.

Most New Zealanders simply will not vote for parties they perceive as being either far-left or far-right.

Sir Roger Douglas, as a former Labour Party minister, understood this. It’s why he spent so much time in the early days of Act visiting factories and talking to workers. He was desperate to convince them that his economic ideas were actually far more emancipatory than those of the Left. Unfortunately, his own political persona was already inextricably bound up with the pain and privation of the "reforms" which bore his name. The workers were having none of it.

Richard Prebble, a less ideologically driven (and much more Machiavellian) politician than Douglas, took his cue from the American Right, which was then engaged in fighting the bitter "Culture Wars" of the Clinton Era. He targeted the angry and alienated denizens of rural, provincial and suburban New Zealand, using the classic wedge issues of race and crime to break-up traditional political allegiances.

Prebble’s strategy was successful to the extent that it secured Act just enough of the Party Vote to become (and remain) a parliamentary player. But, in terms of opening the way to an expanded share of the Party Vote it was a failure. The issues Prebble campaigned on were far-right issues, and that doomed Act to playing politics in the shadow of the National Party, its much larger and more moderate right-wing competitor. Denied access to the centre-ground of politics, it was (like the Alliance) confined to its own rather narrow and politically eccentric demographic.

Sir Roger Douglas’s faction of the party understood this and was forever trying to break Act out of the cul-de-sac into which Prebble’s strategy had steered it. With the election of Rodney Hide as the party’s new leader in 2004 they finally got the chance.

In his heart-of-hearts Hide is a libertarian, and if he'd been able to prevail upon his colleagues to recalibrate Act’s political pitch to that part of the population receptive to libertarian ideals, then the party’s future might have been very different.

The model Hide should have followed is Sir Robert Jones’ New Zealand Party. On economic issues, Sir Robert was very much a part of what was then called "The New Right". But – and it is a vitally important "but" – on other issues he was well to the left of the Labour Party.

To the consternation of his business colleagues, Jones not only declared himself a supporter of a Nuclear-Free New Zealand, but he also called for an end to the ANZUS Treaty and the abolition of the armed forces.

This radical pacifist stance seriously messed with the voters’ heads. It was very hard to pin a "far-right" label on a man whose defence policies stood to the left of the Values Party! The 12 percent of the popular vote which Jones’ NZ Party attracted in the snap-election of 1984 included a much broader cross-section of the electorate than Act has ever been able to attract. Jones’ political iconoclasm was pure electoral gold.

So, if Act really wants to break out of the authoritarian cul-de-sac in which it finds itself, it needs to come up with some radical and head-messing policies. An across-the-board decriminalisation of all drugs would be a good start – supported by a comprehensive drug-education programme in schools and generous drug-treatment and rehabilitation schemes for addicts.

And that would only be the beginning.

What's to stop Act from going on to announce a campaign to restore all the traditional rights and freedoms of free-born citizens by rolling back all those so-called "reforms" of the legal and penal systems which have empowered the State at the expense of the "sovereign individual"? Or, coming out in support of a woman's right to choose and gay marriage?

Overnight, Act would lose its creepy followers from the Sensible Sentencing Trust and Family First. In their place it would attract a much larger – and younger – slice of the electorate: a slice that is socially-liberal, economically "dry" and temperamentally hostile to the claims of large and authoritarian institutions – especially the State.

The party would still be a bastion of neoliberal thought, but by taking such a radical libertarian stand on issues like drugs, law and order and the power of the State, Act would finally be able to detach the "far-right" label from its back.

Is it too late for Hide to rediscover his "Inner Libertarian" and jettison Act's far-right authoritarian baggage?

Probably.

But it’s just possible that Sir Roger Douglas and Heather Roy, having suffered so cruelly at the hands of the creepies in "Act One", could redeem both themselves and their battered party by striking-out on a long march of their own towards "Act Two".