Ms O'Sullivan's Curious Commentary

Not Stupid: Fran O'Sullivan is one of New Zealand's most experienced journalists. What, then, lies behind her rather odd analysis of David Shearer's political options at this weekend's Labour Party Conference?

 

LET’S BEGIN with the headline: “Shearer’s vision can unite Labour”. That’s what the Herald’s subs called this morning’s opinion piece by Fran O’Sullivan. It sounded hopeful, but it didn’t take me very long to realise that Ms O’Sullivan was actually urging Mr Shearer to do exactly the opposite:

 

“He should not be afraid to upset grassroot Labour Party members this weekend – particularly the anonymous bloggers who get far too much attention.

 

“Shearer should make it clear he has not resiled from the vision he put forward in Parliament soon after his colleagues voted him leader. That vision is more likely to capture middle-class votes than simply playing to ‘our people’.”

 

Now, I’ve known Ms O’Sullivan for many years, and one thing she isn’t is stupid. On the face of it, however, her column in this morning’s Herald was just that: stupid.

 

Why would any credible political commentator advise a party leader installed over the objections of his own rank-and-file to roll up to his first party conference and piss them off all over again? Why would she suggest that his policy announcements be directed not at “our people” (i.e. the party’s electoral base) but at middle-class voters whose most distinguishing political characteristic over the past four years has been their open contempt and hostility towards the poor and the marginalised?

 

What does Ms O’Sullivan know that we “anonymous bloggers” don’t? (And let me note here how surprised I was to learn that Duncan Garner, Gordon Campbell, Martyn Bradbury, Danyl McLachlan, Brian Edwards and Scott Yorke weren’t those bloggers’ real names!)

 

Does this veteran business journalist have some special insight into this country’s political machinations which allows her to confidently brush aside the rank-and-file of the Labour Party as irrelevant to the outcome of the next general election? In spite of the recent US presidential election demonstrating just how important an effective “ground game” has become to securing victory, Ms O’Sullivan feels able to reassure Mr Shearer that he can safely ignore the very people who make an effective “ground game” possible. Why is that?

 

Perhaps the answer lies in her prediction that playing to the prejudices of the middle-class rather than “our people” would “also yield good results for New Zealand’s economy and business”. Perhaps she envisages the business audiences (to which Mr Shearer – a “fiscal conservative” – is said to have so much appeal) digging deep into their pockets to finance a campaign that would allow the Leader of the Opposition to make an end-run around his own membership?

 

That would certainly seem to be the strategic thinking behind both Ms O’Sullivan’s and Mr Shearer’s references to the former Finnish prime minister, Esko Aho.

 

“[H]e thought it was more important to make a difference than to get re-elected”, Mr Shearer is quoted as saying. “I can tell you I have no interest in being a prime minister who just cautiously tinkers.”

 

And it is here, I believe, that we come to the heart of Ms O’Sullivan’s thinking about Mr Shearer and the sort of Labour Government he might lead. The template in use is, of course, the one bequeathed to us by the Fourth Labour Government.

The Labour Party that gave us “Rogernomics” will always enjoy the special affection of neoliberals like Ms O’Sullivan. Not only for implementing policies that a conservative government would have had to introduce at the point of a gun, but for destroying both the Labour Party and the labour movement in the process.

 

The Lange-Douglas government corrupted everything it touched – including the MPs and party officials who opted to remain inside the empty shell Labour had become after three-fourths of its members – including the best and brightest of its left-wing heart – had departed in disgust. Helen Clark and her enablers may not have been neoliberals, but nor were they prepared to confront or repudiate the neoliberalism which the Lange-Douglas partnership had made the default setting of “New Zealand’s economy and business”.

 

In the nine long years it took Labour (with Jim Anderton’s Alliance in support) to claw its way back to the treasury benches, the trade union movement, as an effective counterweight to corporate power, had been destroyed and the state bureaucracy purged of its civil service ethic. And yet, after nine long years of Labour rule, the countervailing democratic powers of these crucial institutions remained unrestored.

 

It is this seeming inability (or is it unwillingness?) to challenge the neoliberal establishment with something more robust and modern (Josie Pagani take note) than a reheated Blairism which lies at the root of the Labour Party’s (as opposed to the Labour Caucus’s) restiveness. It explains the party membership's endorsement, by a margin of two-to-one, of David Cunliffe's candidacy last December.

Alone among his caucus colleagues Mr Cunliffe grasps how profoundly the global financial crisis is changing the nature of the political-economic game. In response (and in marked contrast to his boss) he's increasingly willing to publicly challenge the dominant neoliberal paradigm. Mr Cunliffe’s popularity among rank-and-file Labour members reflects the wider societal hunger for a genuine alternative to what is clearly a failing system.

 

It is also, I suspect, why even Ms O’Sullivan (who, as I said, is not stupid) writes: “[I]t is abundantly clear that Cunliffe would make a much more compelling Opposition leader than Shearer. He is hard-headed. He has been politically blooded. He has Cabinet experience. He is in tune with Labour’s base.”

 

So it is Mr Cunliffe’s – not Mr Shearer’s – vision that can unite Labour. Isn’t that what Ms O’Sullivan’s column is really saying? And isn’t that why she and all her right-wing colleagues in the mainstream news media are so determined that he NOT replace the incumbent? Isn’t that why they are talking-up Ms Pagani? Isn’t that why they’re begging Labour’s members to give Mr Shearer “more time”?

 

A Labour-led Government headed by the man who takes inspiration from the right-wing Esko Aho; the man who has no interest in being a leader who “cautiously tinkers”; the man who thinks it’s “more important to make a difference than get re-elected”; would be a government hell-bent on repeating the devastating mistakes of the 1980s.

 

Not only that, it would be a government which left what’s left of the Left as demoralised and divided as the government which, in the six bitter years between 1984 and 1990, tore New Zealand’s social-democratic society to pieces.

 

A consummation devoutly to be wished – at least by Ms O’Sullivan.

 

This posting is exclusive to the Bowalley Road blogsite.