In 2020, As In 1984, Young And Old May Vote Together.

Together, Not Apart: In political terms, 2020 represents the exact reverse of 1984. Then, the tide was running with the challengers. Now, it is running with the incumbents. If Labour and the Greens can plausibly guarantee to keep us working and keep us safe, then traditional demographic voting patterns will cease to matter. Young and old, rich and poor, brown and white will repay Jacinda with a landslide.

HERE WE GO AGAIN. Young New Zealanders are not registering to vote in anything like the numbers needed to re-elect Jacinda Ardern. Labour relies on the voters aged between 25 and 55 years-of-age to supply the bulk of its Party Vote. If voters aged between 18 and 25 registered and voted in anything like the same numbers as the centre-left’s core vote, Labour would long ago have become New Zealand’s “natural party of government”.

Labour’s vulnerability stems not only from the unwillingness of 18-25 year-olds to engage with and participate in electoral politics, but also from the determination of older voters to make their voices heard. Unfortunately, those older voices chorus persistently for the Right.

This raises the grim spectre of a right-wing victory secured almost entirely by the toxic combination of an extremely high percentage of older voters turning out to vote for the National Party, and a comparatively low percentage of younger voters actually bothering to vote Labour or Green. If Judith Collins makes sure she does nothing to dissuade the over-55s from following their usual political instincts, and if Jacinda Ardern cannot persuade the youngest cohort of voters to come out for her in record numbers, then National could end up defeating Labour on 19 September.

The $64,000 question for Labour is: “How do we prevent this from happening?”

It’s not enough to say that the party should offer 18-25 year-olds a manifesto shaped to fit their preferences. Given that those aged between 18 and 25 are consistently the staunchest supporters of radical left-wing economic, social and environmental policies, constructing Labour’s platform to reflect their preferences exclusively would, almost certainly, alienate the support of older voters. If an 80-90 percent turnout of the youngest voting cohort could be guaranteed, it might be worth the risk. The problem is, not even the proudly radical policies of the Greens are enough to make 18-25 year-olds turn out like the over-70s.

Perhaps the only circumstances in which the 18-25 cohort could be lured to the polls in great numbers would be those in which the hunger for national unity, stimulated by a once-in-a-generation confluence of multiple interests, was strong enough to generate a massive cross-class and cross-generational spike in electoral participation.

Something very close to this occurred in the snap-election of 1984. Economic controls usually reserved for wartime, including wage, price, rent and interest-rate “freezes”, combined with high levels of unemployment and rapidly rising fears of a nuclear holocaust to produce a nationwide determination to change the government. Workers and employers united against Muldoon’s dirigiste economic management. Old and young came together to create a nuclear-free New Zealand.

Against this extraordinary coalition, the National Government of Rob Muldoon, which had come to epitomise everything hostile and/or resistant to what many argued were long overdue social and economic changes, didn’t stand a chance. The highest turn out in New Zealand political history – 93.7 percent of registered voters – swept Muldoon and his divisive policies out of office and ushered in an unexpected (and unannounced) revolution.

The question to be answered, just 8 weeks out from the 2020 general election, is whether or not a similar tidal wave of change is gathering?

While there is, indisputably, a strong desire among the politically engaged to seize the opportunity provided by Covid-19 to undertake a general social, economic and environmental “re-set”, it in no way matches the “Spirit of ‘84”. Which is not to say that the cross-class, cross-generational momentum that characterised 1984 isn’t also present in 2020. On this occasion, however, the public mood may best be summarised by paraphrasing Gandalf in The Fellowship of the Ring:

“Keep us working, and keep us safe!”

The still-raging global Covid-19 pandemic has drawn New Zealanders together in ways not seen since World War II. Jacinda Ardern’s “Team of Five Million” may be a brilliant rhetorical flourish, but that doesn’t make it an inaccurate description of the current Kiwi voter’s self-congratulatory self-perception.

In political terms, 2020 represents the exact reverse of 1984. Then, the tide was running with the challengers. Now, it is running with the incumbents. If Labour and the Greens can plausibly guarantee to keep us working and keep us safe, then traditional demographic voting patterns will cease to matter. Young and old, rich and poor, brown and white will repay Jacinda with a landslide.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 24 July 2020.

Jacinda's Biggest Challenge: Redefining "Economic Orthodoxy".

Economics Matters: The jubilation of Election Night 1984 was soon overtaken by the economic and social blitzkrieg that was Rogernomics. So, the two questions voters preparing to elect another popular Labour leader in 2017 need to ask themselves are: Does Jacinda's caucus contain the same number of radical change agents as David Lange's? And, if it doesn't, exactly how far will cautious economic orthodoxy carry Labour towards its goals of social equality and economic justice?

LET’S BEGIN with the assumption that Jacinda Ardern is about to become New Zealand’s next prime minister. And that, after nine very difficult years, Labour is poised to re-take the Treasury Benches. The next step, then, is to ask: “What happens now? What sort of Labour-led Government should we expect?”

More than one political observer has noted the similarities between this year’s general election and that of 1984. They have pointed out that Labour entered both campaigns with a new (or, relatively new) and inspiring leader. They also draw our attention to what they claim is a very similar sense of public frustration with the status quo. Socially, economically and politically, they allege, New Zealand finds itself stalled down a dead-end street. The dramatic response to Jacinda Ardern’s elevation, they say, has revealed the same hunger for bold new solutions to intractable old problems that made the 1984 election such an historical watershed.

The crucial factor in the 1984 equation, however, was the presence in Labour’s caucus of a critical mass of radical change agents. Even more critically, these change agents knew that their radical plans would be instantly endorsed and rapidly expedited by like-minded change agents strategically located in the Reserve Bank and Treasury. They were further reassured by the knowledge that important figures in the upper echelons of both the business community and the news media were sympathetic to their proposed “reforms”. Knowing this, Roger Douglas, Richard Prebble, David Caygill and Michael Bassett were supremely confident that the process of fundamentally changing New Zealand would begin the moment they made it into the Beehive.

In this respect, the contrast between the governments-in-waiting of 1984 and 2017 could hardly be greater. As evidenced by their self-imposed “Budget Responsibility Rules”, the leading figures of a Labour/Green/NZ First government pose no threat whatsoever to the underlying assumptions of the economic and social status-quo. Even the usually hostile right-wing newspaper columnist, John Roughan, seems relaxed about the prospect of electoral change, observing smugly that: “[T]oday’s economic orthodoxy, or ‘neoliberalism’ if you don’t like it, is well entrenched in the public service and there is little risk we will lose it.”

Certainly, as the acknowledged protégé of the former Labour Finance Minister, Sir Michael Cullen, Labour’s current finance spokesperson, Grant Robertson, has repeatedly reaffirmed his support for the standard political operating procedures of the Helen Clark-led Labour Government of 1999-2008.

At the heart of those procedures lies an unshakeable commitment to “responsible” (or, as Mr Roughan would put it, “orthodox”) economic management. No less than his mentor, Sir Michael, Mr Robertson has absorbed the lessons of the infamous “Winter of Discontent” of 2000, during which the New Zealand business community provided the Prime Minister and her Finance Minister with a short but effective demonstration of the sort of reaction any government foolhardy enough to stray from the paths of economic righteousness should expect.

It is difficult to imagine that, over the course of the past month, Mr Robertson has not reiterated those lessons to Ms Ardern. Certainly, her own public commitment to uphold the Labour/Green Budget Responsibility Rules points in that direction.

All of which presents Ms Ardern with a dilemma. On the one hand, her slogan, “Let’s Do This.”, suggests to voters that hers will be a government of action and achievement. On the other, her commitment to uphold the Budget Responsibility Rules speaks to the business community of a government committed to not rocking the boat – or, at least, to not rocking it very vigorously.

But, building “more homes” and delivering “better health and education” will require New Zealand’s social and economic boats to be rocked very vigorously indeed. Every bit as vigorously, in fact, as they were rocked by the “Rogernomes” of the 1980s.

Unfortunately, support for such radical rock-n-rolling will be extremely hard to find among the orthodox defenders of the status-quo populating the upper-reaches of the public service, news media and business community. As in 2000, their response to the merest hint that Labour is getting ready to embrace a genuinely progressive programme will be swift and brutal.

Ms Ardern’s response to their response should be guided by the political strategy of the First Labour Government. Take the people into your confidence. Explain what you want to do for them and identify the forces standing in their way. Reassure them that, with their support, the long-delayed changes in housing, health and education – the changes they voted for – will happen. And, finally, remind them that, in a democracy, crucial decisions about the future of their country must be made by – and for – the many, not the few.

Because the truly astonishing thing about all genuinely radical programmes for change – including those of 1935 and 1984 – is how quickly the utterly impossible of yesterday becomes the entirely doable of today.

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 5 September 2017.

Friends In High Places: Will Jacinda Be Swept Into Power By Another “Revolution From Above”?

People Power: Unlike David Lange in 1984, Jacinda Ardern cannot rely upon the overt and covert assistance of a strategically located ruling-class faction. If she is to be swept into power on a mighty wave of change, then its energy will not come from those who scheme and plot upon the heights, but from the anger of those no longer willing to suffer silently in free-market capitalism’s abysmal depths.

 

IN 1984 the smartest and most ideologically driven members of the New Zealand ruling class were willing Labour to win. In the upper echelons of the Treasury and the Reserve Bank that preference was already being translated into action. Likewise, in the news media, where New Zealand’s leading journalists were already in open and eloquent revolt against “Muldoonism”. In Labour itself, nearly all of the party’s most effective politicians had been similarly converted to the “free market” ideology. Like all the other players, however, they knew that before the new free market era could be ushered-in, Muldoon’s old order had to be brought down.

 

Thirty-three years on, are we witnessing the stirrings of a similar top-down revolution? Is there an equivalent determination among a frustrated fraction of the ruling class to do something about the present National Government’s all-too-obvious inadequacies?

 

New Zealand capitalism is in urgent need of a reboot. The agricultural sector is offering nothing more imaginative than more (and more!) of the same: more cows, more milk powder, more massive irrigation schemes, more befouled waterways. The road transport industry is swallowing a disproportionately large amount of New Zealand’s limited investment capital. Our civil service is not only displaying alarming levels of inefficiency but also outright corruption. The health and education sectors have been deliberately run down to the point where they are now holding back the entire economy.

 

The question is: has the level of dissatisfaction with the current National government’s performance reached the critical mass attained by the enemies of Muldoonism in 1984? Is there rebellion in the ranks of the Reserve Bank and Treasury? Are the leading newspapers full of ideologically-driven critiques of the incumbents’ economic and social policies? Is there a crucial bloc of Labour MPs just aching for the chance to put these new ideas into practice?

 

Certainly, there has been a great deal of “policy work” undertaken by the Labour caucus over the past nine years. What’s lacking, however, is any sense that the leading lights of Labour’s 2017 caucus are as confident as their 1984 predecessors that their policies will be implemented without resistance from the Powers-That-Be. Roger Douglas, Richard Prebble and Michael Bassett knew that Treasury would do everything within its power to facilitate Labour’s blitzkrieg of “reform”. There is simply no sense that Grant Robertson, Phil Twyford or David Parker expect their programme to be received with equal enthusiasm by today’s bureaucrats and businessmen.

 

In summary, the current balance of political and ideological forces is very different from that which prevailed in 1984. Thirty-three years ago, the great neoliberal wave was still gathering momentum. Its inherent contradictions and manifold inequities were not yet apparent to its ideological cheerleaders in the bureaucracy, the business community, the news media and, of course, the NZ Labour Party. Even thirty-three years later, with the inadequacies of neoliberalism laid bare by the global financial crisis of 2008-2009, there is no broadly accepted alternative to our entrenched free-market system.

 

Jacinda Ardern cannot, therefore, rely upon the overt and covert assistance of a strategically located ruling-class faction convinced that they have seen the future – and that it works. If she is to be swept into power on a mighty wave of change, then its energy will not come from those who scheme and plot upon the heights, but from the anger of those no longer willing to suffer silently in free-market capitalism’s abysmal depths.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Monday, 7 August 2017.

Are Jacinda Ardern’s “Sunny Ways” Enough To Mobilise Savage’s Grandchildren?

All changed, changed utterly:

A terrible beauty is born.

- William Butler Yeats, “Easter 1916”

MIKE WILLIAMS, searching for a political precedent, reached all the way back to the Snap Election of 1984. His fellow panellists on TVNZ’s Q+A couldn’t help but agree. Certainly, I remember the electrifying effect of Rob Muldoon’s surprise announcement. On the evening of the day after the night before, dozens of people turned up to the emergency campaign committee meeting called by Stan Roger, Labour’s candidate for Dunedin North. The meeting room was far too small to accommodate all of them comfortably. It was standing room only – with the doors flung wide.

I recall looking at the faces of the people present. Some were familiar, party stalwarts of forty years standing, but many were new. Looking at the younger, middle-class professionals lining up along the walls, the nascent political analyst in me could hardly miss the blindingly obvious conclusion: Labour was going to win.

Even in the 1980s, Labour needed more than the unionised working-class to seize the Treasury Benches. Thirty years ago – just like today – electoral victory could be secured only by drawing into Labour’s ranks a critical mass of young, well-educated, urban professionals: the confident offspring of Mickey Savage’s welfare state. (The very same demographic, it should be noted, who rescued Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party from oblivion back in June.)

It’s a notoriously difficult group to engage politically. If they cannot be convinced that something new and positive will be achieved by casting a vote, then they have no qualms at all about sitting an election out. In 1984 the opportunity to usher in something new and positive was unmistakeable and the yuppies seized it with both hands. Nine years of Rob Muldoon had been more than enough!

Jacinda Ardern’s dramatic ascension to the Labour leadership has captured the attention of Savage’s children and grandchildren alike. Her arrival has generated an overwhelming surge of money and people into Labour’s camp. More than that, however, her “unrelentingly positivie” and “sunny ways” are rapidly persuading tens-of-thousands of young New Zealanders that – this time – casting a vote just might make a difference.

If that process of persuasion and mobilisation is to continue, however, Ms Ardern must make very clear what she is running against. In 1984, David Lange was challenging Muldoon’s last-ditch defence of Keynesian economics. New Zealanders had had enough of wage and price freezes, massive agricultural subsidies and patently absurd bureaucratic regulations. “You can’t run a country like a Polish shipyard!”, Lange thundered, and the New Zealand electorate cheered him to the echo.

In 2017, Ms Ardern is running against a very different set of economic and social phenomena. Her targets are not massive and poorly directed state interventions, or heavy-handed government controls. On the contrary, her targets are the consequences of Keynesian economics wholesale rejection. When she says “Let’s do this!”, the “this” that her supporters anticipate is an unequivocal repudiation of the squalor and misery that Roger Douglas unleashed, Ruth Richardson intensified, and which even Helen Clark’s and Michael Cullen’s best efforts failed to eliminate. Jacinda’s “Muldoon” is Neoliberalism: the relentless extension of competitive markets into every corner of New Zealand society and into every facet of New Zealanders’ lives.

Nowhere are the consequences of this country’s thirty-year neoliberal experiment more obvious than in housing, health, education and the environment. The squalid spectacle of poverty amidst plenty. The entrenched inter-generational unfairness of the housing market. The deep cultural affront of undrinkable water and unswimmable rivers. The virtual debt peonage into which so many young New Zealanders seeking higher education have fallen. The appalling state of New Zealand’s mental health services. These are the targets upon which Ms Ardern must train her rhetorical guns. To prove that “New Zealand can be better than this” – they are the giants she must slay.

“All changed, changed utterly” was how the Irish poet William Butler Yeats described the Ireland that emerged from the tragedy of the 1916 Easter Rebellion. Before the rising, he had despaired of his society as a place where only fools prospered; a place of “polite meaningless words” and pointless pub conversations. And then, suddenly, it wasn’t. Where once there had been the despondent resignation that nothing could ever change, the uprising’s tragic heroism was transforming everything. Suddenly, a “terrible beauty” was born.

Yeats is right. The Goddess of History is a terrible deity to behold. Ruthless and utterly uncompromising in her expectations of those she thrusts forward onto the stage of human affairs. Yes, it is a good thing to be “unrelentingly positive”. And, yes, “sunny ways” are by far the best means of securing the electorate’s co-operation. But, if Ms Ardern intends to offer them as alternatives to a 1984-style electoral uprising, then she will fail.

“Sunny ways” are not enough.

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 8 August 2017.

Little Big Man: Who Is Dr Bryce Wilkinson - And Why Should We Care?

Bryce Who? Small and unprepossessing, smiling his grandfatherly smile, Dr Bryce Wilkinson would be passed, unrecognised, in the street by 999 out of 1,000 New Zealanders. And yet, unelected, and largely unknown outside the neoliberal elite, this little man has left a very big impression on our country.

 

DR BRYCE WILKINSON can make a reasonable claim to have written the book that launched neoliberalism in New Zealand. The name of that book was Economic Management, and although its official author was the New Zealand Treasury, most historians agree that the book’s guiding intellect was Dr Wilkinson’s.

 

Economic Management knitted together, into what amounted to a detailed manifesto, a raft of radical economic measures that had been worked out in “Economics II” – described by Te Ara, The Encyclopaedia of New Zealand, as: “a think tank in the Treasury in the late 1970s and early 1980s.”

 

Economics II was staffed by young economists who had studied at universities in the United States where the monetarist theories of Milton Friedman, and the ideas of neo-classical economics generally, were already well-entrenched. Along with Dr Wilkinson, Treasury’s “think tank” included Graeme Scott, Rod Deane and Roger Kerr – individuals who would go on to play pivotal roles in the execution and consolidation of the neoliberal order in New Zealand.

 

When the Labour Party was swept into office at the snap election of 1984, Economic Management was waiting for them.

 

“But, wait a minute!”, I hear you object, “Since when does Treasury supply New Zealand’s political parties with ready-made manifestoes? Didn’t Labour have a manifesto of its own in 1984?” Indeed it did – but not the sort of manifesto in which anyone could place much confidence.

 

Though the public were not told, Labour’s manifesto was a hastily-cobbled-together mish-mash of the policies advocated by Labour’s left-wing dominated Policy Council, and the ideas emanating from the faction in Labour’s caucus led by Roger Douglas and his fellow “reformers” Michael Bassett, Richard Prebble, Mike Moore and David Caygill.

 

So extreme were the ideas of Douglas’s faction, and so hostile to Labour’s traditions, that a new faction was summoned into existence to fight them. By May of 1984, this latter group was circulating a document posing a radical left-wing alternative to the right-wing measures being fed directly to Douglas and his followers by their special Treasury adviser, Doug Anthony.

 

Had the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Muldoon, fearing a loss of his parliamentary majority, not called an early election on the night of 14 June 1984, it is fascinating to speculate as to which of these two, diametrically opposed, factions would have triumphed. An election held at the usual time, in November 1984, would have given Labour four more months (and an annual conference) to decide its future direction. Denied that time, the contending factions were persuaded to let David Lange’s deputy, the former Law Professor, Geoffrey Palmer, compose a manifesto both sides could live with, but which, as a reliable guide to the party’s future conduct in government, was next to useless.

 

Labour’s Bastille Day victory ceded the political initiative to Douglas’s faction. That the country was said by the Reserve Bank and Treasury to be in the grip of a “financial crisis” contributed hugely to the Right’s ability to control the course of events. Precipitated by a policy paper outlining Douglas’s determination to devalue the NZ dollar by 20 percent (which somehow ended up in the hands of the news media), the “financial crisis”, and the new government’s decisive handling of it, brought the Left/Right policy debate to an abrupt (if only temporary) end. It would be Dr Wilkinson’s Economic Management which set the course for what would later be called “Rogernomics”.

 

Readers of Bowalley Road born after those heady days in 1984, and thus played no part in the great struggle for Labour’s heart and soul that raged from July 1984 until the ejection of Mike Moore from – and the elevation of Helen Clark to – the leadership of the Labour Party in 1993, have been supplied with this brief sketch of the role Dr Wilkinson has played in New Zealand’s recent history, so that they can put his statement on foreign investment and racism, released earlier today (17/8/15) into some kind of context.

 

Commenting on the KPMG report showing China to be only the second-largest foreign investor (after Canada) in New Zealand (excluding residential property) Dr Wilkinson is reported as saying that “the report tackled many New Zealanders’ fears that China was buying up land, farms and businesses.” Anxiety about China was producing a “silly defensiveness” he said, adding that “racist attitudes and red tape were making New Zealand one of the most restrictive regimes in the world”. According to Dr Wilkinson: “We should be much freer and more open to the rest of the world and that helps New Zealanders get a better price for their assets which means they can invest more in the rest of the world themselves.”

 

More free and open! Such is the prescription of the man who, along with his colleagues from Economics II, persuaded the fourth Labour government to transform New Zealand into the most “free” and “open” economy on Earth. The man who urged on the sale of public assets to “foreign investors”, who were then free to repatriate the billions of dollars of profits extracted from them to their new owners offshore. The man who now calls those attempting to keep what remains of New Zealand’s assets out of foreign hands “racist”, but whose policy of preparing state-owned entities for privatisation saw tens-of-thousands of Maori forestry workers, railway workers and construction workers thrown out of their state jobs – leading to the disintegration of whole communities and the fracturing of whanau.

 

Small and unprepossessing, smiling his grandfatherly smile in the group photos of the New Zealand Initiative (successor to the now defunct Business Roundtable, which for many years was run by another alumnus from Economics II, Roger Kerr) Dr Wilkinson would be passed, unrecognised, in the street by 999 out of 1,000 New Zealanders. And yet, unelected, and largely unknown outside the neoliberal elite, this little man has left a very big impression on our country.

 

I’ll leave it for you, the reader, to decide whether it has been for good or ill.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Monday, 17 August 2015.

Love Lifts Us Up: Thoughts From The Green Party's Campaign Launch.

Super Luminaries: Greens co-leader chats with Man Booker prize-winner Eleanor Catton who delivered a moving endorsement of "Love New Zealand - Party Vote Green" at the party's campaign launch on Sunday 17 August 2014. Photo by Peter Meecham.

 

NO ONE WAS QUITE SURE how he did it. Somehow Bob Harvey had persuaded the owners of the rights to Joe Cocker’s Up Where We Belong to authorize its use as the New Zealand Labour Party’s 1984 campaign anthem. The theme song from An Officer and a Gentleman had, of course, been enormously popular, so arranging for the David Lange-led Labour Party to make its pitch to the New Zealand electorate over its soaring melody and aspirational lyrics was a coup of no mean proportions.
 

But it was much more than that. Joe Cocker’s song perfectly matched the mood of the times. For nine long years, through Carless Days, Think Big, Olympic Boycotts, Springbok Tours and the Wage and Price Freeze the New Zealand people had borne both the curses and the blessings of Sir Robert Muldoon’s leadership with stoical endurance. But, by the winter of 1984, the patience of two-thirds of the population had been exhausted.
 

David Lange knew it and with oratory every bit as uplifting as Joe Cocker’s song he offered the voters the vision of a better New Zealand where consensus would replace confrontation and the cramped orthodoxies of a world that was fast disappearing would give way to new ideas, new opportunities and new freedoms. In the famous leaders’ debate, when, in the closing moments, Lange reached out to Sir Robert and assured him that any contribution he wished to make to this new New Zealand would not be scorned, it brought tears to the old tusker’s eyes and prompted his astonishing rejoinder: “I love you too, Mr Lange.”
 

Love lifts us up where we belong – and then some!

 



 

I’m wondering if we might not be heading into another election where Love lifts a new government into power. Rather appropriately, I suppose, the thought occurred to me at the campaign launch of the Greens.
 

Ever since the Green Party entered Parliament in 1999 it’s MPs have attempted to prove that politics does not need to be “dirty”. That it is possible to debate issues rationally – without rancour. And now, a month out from polling day, and with the National Party disintegrating before our eyes like a vampire in the sun, the Greens are asking us all to “Love New Zealand”.
 

This is not a mere feel-good exhortation, either, but an invitation to the 3 percent of New Zealanders who earn more than $140,000 to put their money where the hungry mouths of 200,000 children are. The Greens proposed new top tax-rate of 40 percent is to be devoted exclusively to the elimination of child poverty in New Zealand. A case of not only sharing the love, but the wealth as well.
 

It was a courageous speech that the Greens’ co-leader Metiria Turei gave. Indeed, it filled in the gaps that were so noticeable in David Cunliffe’s speech to the Labour Party faithful last weekend. Any words concerning the fate of the children of beneficiaries and what might be done for them were conspicuous by their absence at Labour’s campaign launch, so it was reassuring to hear them voiced loud and clear to the 300-400 people crammed into the auditorium at Auckland’s AUT campus.
 

Reassuring, also, to hear the words of endorsement penned by New Zealand’s award-winning young novelist, Eleanor Catton. Her speech was as moving and as evocative as any I have heard in 30 years of attending such occasions.
 

The sneak preview provided by the organisers of the Green Party’s opening political broadcast made it clear just how seriously the party is committed to remaining upbeat and positive. Russel Norman and Turei have both been used to good effect, delivering their party’s messages with energy and conviction.
 

The most telling moment in this broadcast – at least for me – came when Turei and her daughter, Piupiu, are walking along the beach at Piha and the proud mother talks about making sure that this simple pleasure remains for her children – and grandchildren – to enjoy. The look Piupiu shoots her mother will be familiar to all the parents of teenage daughters. The “Aw, Mum!” moment is so natural and so real that it steals your heart away completely.
 

If the revelations mounting up against the National Party continue into the election campaign proper, then the voters will very quickly become sick of the stench of “dirty politics”. Like people forced to spend too long in an abattoir, they will emerge into the daylight desperate to fill their lungs with clean, fresh air. And quite serendipitously,  that’s exactly what the Greens’ “Love New Zealand” campaign (along with Labour’s “Vote Positive”) aims to provide: relief from the odours of what Nicky Hager calls “the pit”.
 

A nation grown weary of sleaze and tired of being manipulated may yet decide to award a decisive election victory to an Opposition coalition determined to prove how much better New Zealand could be with “cleaner, fairer and smarter” policies.
 

In the immortal words of The Beatles: “All you need is love.”

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Monday, 18 August 2014.

Labour's Flight From Reality.

Borne Aloft: It wasn't Love that lifted Labour up where it belonged in 1984, but a branch membership of 85,000. If Labour's boosters are right, and Labour's membership has soared miraculously to the levels of 30 years ago, then why is the party registering barely 30 percent in the opinion polls? The David Lange-led Labour Party won 43 percent of the popular vote in 1984 on a record turn-out of 93.7 percent of registered voters. David Cunliffe should be so lucky!

 

STALLED AT 30 PERCENT in the polls, Labour is still pretending it can win the General Election without help. Bluntly speaking, the party is in a state of serious, collective denial. The most frightening aspect of which, from the perspective of those New Zealanders seeking a change of government in September, is that while the condition persists National cannot possibly be defeated. Heedless, the Labour Party continues to fly from the reality of its own poor performance. Even worse, it’s begun flying from the reality of its own history.

 

Over the past few weeks Labour’s boosters have begun to brag that the party’s membership is the highest it has been in 30 years.

 

Let’s just pause for a moment and unpick that statement.

 

Thirty years ago, in June 1984, the “ordinary” or “branch” membership of the NZ Labour Party stood at 85,000. In addition to these card-carrying members, an additional 12,500 individuals were contributing regularly to the party’s “Victory For Labour” fund. The trade union affiliate membership of the Labour Party, in that era of mass union membership, stood somewhere in the vicinity of 200,000.

 

With this vast membership, organised into hundreds of branches across the country, it is not difficult to understand why the registered voter turnout in the snap election of 1984 was a record 93.7 percent. Nor is it surprising to learn that even in a First-Past-the-Post election featuring four serious contenders (Labour, National, Social Credit and Bob Jones’s New Zealand Party) the David Lange-led Labour Party secured 43 percent of the votes cast.

 

Knowing this, and hearing Labour’s present leadership boast about the party having more members than it had in 1984 is, understandably, a little jarring. Yes, the party benefited hugely from the influx of members that accompanied last September’s  Leadership Election. Membership may well have doubled, as many boosters insist. But even if that’s true, the current membership total is still relatively modest. The best estimates place it somewhere between 15,000 and 20,000 – well short of that mid-80s peak.

 

(There is, of course, a chance that my informants’ estimates are wrong. Something Labour could verify in an instant by releasing its full membership details to the news media.)

 

I am concentrating on Labour’s putative numbers because they form the basis for David Cunliffe’s increasingly wacky optimism.

 

He is being told that with this vastly expanded army of volunteers at his back, and with a software package capable of identifying the voters Labour needs to win, the party’s parlous position in the polls, and its crippling lack of funds, will, on Election Day, be gloriously transcended and, in the rich glow of victory, the pundits will be required to eat a heapin’ helpin’ of Crow.

 

But Mr Cunliffe should do the math.

 

Only 10 percent of any membership base should ever be counted on to make a consistent contribution to the cause. Back in 1984 that rule-of-thumb gave the party organisation around 10,000 reliable activists on the ground. An average of 105 activists per electorate. That same rule, applied to the best estimates of the party’s membership base, yields Labour just 28 activists per electorate in 2014.

 

Mr Cunliffe is being spun a fantasy. Twenty-eight activists per electorate simply cannot lift Labour’s level of support from 30 percent to 43 percent of the popular vote. Believing Labour can replicate the extraordinary effort and turnout of 1984 is an exercise in collective delirium.

 

It ain’t gonna happen.

 

When Mr Cunliffe openly acknowledges that he will only become Prime Minister with the backing of the Greens and the Internet-Mana Party, Labour will have taken the first important step towards political recovery.

 

When he takes the public into his confidence about the range of policies he would be prepared to live with in the interests of building a strong coalition government, then the voters will begin to extend their trust.

 

When Labour casts aside Winston Peters’ absurd notion that voters are somehow advantaged by being required to buy a pig in a poke – only getting to see exactly what sort of pig, and what sort of poke, when it’s too late for them to do anything about either – will the electorate recover the power to determine the content of their preferred coalition government’s mandate before the election.

 

At the heart of Labour’s political malady lies the crooked notion that the right to govern is theirs and theirs alone. That, having been withheld from them by the ignorance of the electorate, they have only to wait for the voters, pricked by their consciences, to hand power back to them, unexamined and untouched, so that they may resume their governance of the country from precisely the point where they were so rudely and ungratefully required to give it up.

 

Not surprisingly, the Government’s opponents are taking precautions against such political insanity.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 3 June 2014.

Braving The Snow

Insufficient Deterrent: Even snow could not dissuade electors from turning out to defeat Sir Robert Muldoon's National Government in the snap winter election of 14 July 1984. If people are given a reason to vote - they'll vote.

IN DUNEDIN, on 14 July 1984, it snowed. One of those raw Southern days when the wind blows straight from the pole, Election Day 1984 arrived with the sort of weather most elderly people could have been forgiven for avoiding. But, bundled up against the cold, I found myself trudging up Carroll Street behind a very old woman. Bent against the wind, with snow in her hair, she put one foot in front of the other, using her walking stick to push her frail body up the hill toward the polling booth. As I overtook her, I paused and asked if I she needed any help.

“No thank you, Dear,” she smiled, “I can get rid of that bastard Muldoon all on my own.”

It was the high water mark of voter participation in New Zealand: never before, and never since, have so many registered voters participated in a General Election. One or two electoral contests had come close, but the turnout of 1984, at 93 percent, was the all-time record.

How, then, to explain the record low participation rate of 2011? Barely two-thirds of eligible voters bothered to cast a vote at last year’s election. For one reason or another, an astonishing one million New Zealanders never made it to a polling-booth. Not since the years prior to the introduction of universal suffrage in 1893 has New Zealand recorded such a poor democratic performance.

Sharp explanatory differences have emerged between political scientists in relation to last year’s abysmal turn-out. The veteran psephologist, and Professorial Fellow in Political Science at Victoria University, Nigel Roberts, seems to think the fault lies with us, the people. Too many of us, he suggests, have failed to fulfil our democratic duty, and for this failure we must be punished by Parliament. That’s right, the former professor believes New Zealanders, like Australians, should be legally required to present themselves at the polling-stations.

Mandatory participation, argues Professor Roberts, would have the (presumably beneficial) effect of negating the political advantages accruing to well-organised and well-funded political parties. If we’re all legally required to turn up at the polling-stations, then all political parties will compete for votes on the same footing: the least effective having as much chance of winning support as the most effective.

This approach doubtless outrages Dr Bryce Edwards, a political scientist teaching at the University of Otago, who places the blame for the low turnout of 2011 squarely on the shoulders of the politicians themselves: “It should be embarrassing for politicians and political parties because they’re the people that aren’t having their product bought.”

The findings of a survey of 272 non-voters conducted on behalf of the Electoral Commission tends to support Dr Edward’s contention. Roughly a third of non-voting respondents stated that they either did not trust politicians, or that they “just [weren’t] interested in politics”.

It is instructive (and not a little depressing) to contrast the findings of the Electoral Commission’s survey with the attitude of that elderly woman trudging up Carroll Street in the snow to cast her ballot.

Clearly, she placed no trust in the Government of Sir Robert Muldoon, but that lack of trust, far from being a reason not to vote, was her prime motivation for weathering the snowstorm. And, equally clearly, this woman was interested in politics, and knew exactly what was at stake in the Snap Election of 1984. Her faith in the power of her vote burned brightly on that grey Dunedin day, and so did her faith in the political alternative to the Muldoon-led National Party Government.

On 14 July 1984, David Lange led a Labour Party which had yet to openly embrace the economic policies of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Not even I – a Labour activist responsible for the publicity of one of Dunedin’s Labour candidates – had any clear idea of the terrible betrayals that lay ahead (although there were disquieting signs). As I made my own way up Carroll Street I was relishing the prospect of New Zealand being declared nuclear-free; of compulsory unionism being restored; of the wage/price freeze being lifted; and of a decisive break with the apartheid regime in South Africa.

And it is here that my own views, and those of Dr Edwards begin to mesh. On Bastille Day 1984, for those who did not subscribe to Sir Robert’s ideas about how to run the New Zealand economy; for those who rejected his interpretation of the ANZUS Treaty and were furious at his refusal to sever all ties with the South African racists; there was a political alternative.

Or, so we thought.

The Chief Electoral Officer, Roger Peden, says he is deeply concerned at the long-term steep decline in voter participation since the record turn-out of 1984.

The year when voting was still worth braving a snowstorm.

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 1 May 2012.