Sweet Surrender.

Who's Ya Mama? What makes Labour’s decision to dilute the power of the Electoral College so puzzling is that Jacinda Ardern would undoubtedly be elected by Caucus and Party with near unanimous support.

THERE IS ALWAYS something deeply depressing about the phenomenon of people voluntarily surrendering their political power. That sense of tragedy is only compounded when the power being surrendered was hard-won. To have power ripped away from you by force is bad enough, but to meekly hand it over is morally reprehensible. Why, then, has the Labour Party chosen to behave reprehensibly?

The hard-won power under scrutiny here is the right of the Labour Party’s rank-and-file members and its trade union affiliates to participate in the election of the Labour Leader – alongside Labour’s Parliamentary Caucus. This was significantly diluted at Labour’s “virtual” Annual Conference which took place over the weekend just passed (6-7/11/21).

Utterly inadequate coverage of the issue by the mainstream news media (assisted greatly by the Labour Party organisation’s decision to bar journalists from witnessing the entire decision-making process) has given rise to a certain amount of uncertainty. Will the new electoral regime operate only when Labour is in government, or all the time? Assuming it’s the latter, then the electoral college will only ever come into force if a candidate for the leadership fails to secure two-thirds of the votes of his or her Caucus colleagues.

The most common argument advanced by those favouring this revision of the Party’s constitution was historical. Members were encouraged to look at the record. The Electoral College delivered Labour David Cunliffe and Andrew Little. The Caucus, on its own (because the election was less than three months away) delivered Labour – and New Zealand – Jacinda Ardern.

Cunliffe led Labour to its worst result since the 1920s. Ardern lifted Labour’s vote to the point where Winston Peters could anoint her Prime Minister. According to this argument, the Electoral College has been road-tested to the Party’s near destruction. Labour’s recent political history proves that party leaders are best chosen by the candidates’ parliamentary peers: the people uniquely positioned to see them up-close and personal. In short: Caucus should elect Labour’s Leaders, because Caucus knows them best.

Superficially, at least, this argument has a powerful attraction. There is no doubt that David Cunliffe was not well-liked by a significant number of his Caucus colleagues. Nor can it be disputed that his conduct of the 2014 election campaign was, at best, erratic. There are, however, a great many reasons why an ambitious member of any parliamentary caucus might end up being despised by his or her colleagues. Likewise, there are many factors contributing to the production of an erratic campaign.

A clever and ambitious parliamentarian who refuses to recognise the political pecking-order, and/or is unwilling to join one or other of the dominant party factions, preferring, instead, to set about constructing his or her own, will very, very swiftly acquire some pretty powerful enemies. Their enmity will only intensify if it becomes clear that the upstart has made him or herself the darling of the party. Throw ideological heterodoxy into the mix (almost certainly the explanation for Cunliffe’s popularity with Labour’s anti-neoliberal rank-and-file) and that enmity will turn deadly. The senior Labour MPs behind the ABC – Anybody But Cunliffe – group certainly recognised a dangerous interloper when they saw one.

A party caucus containing a majority of political enemies can inflict a great deal of damage on the best of leaders. Private off-the-record briefings against Cunliffe began long before he was overwhelmingly elected to the Labour Party leadership in September 2013. His exposure of the yawning ideological gulf separating Labour’s Caucus from the Party’s rank-and-file only made matters worse.

The open and relentless hatred directed against Cunliffe arguably kept him emotionally and politically off-balance. Running an effective Opposition election campaign is hard enough when your party’s heavy-hitters are all behind you. Battling one’s electoral opponents, while attempting to fend off one’s political enemies (and their well-briefed media allies) makes the job well-nigh impossible.

That Grant Robertson failed (by the narrowest of margins) to defeat Andrew Little in the second (and last?) leadership contest was in no small measure due to the membership’s smouldering resentment at the Caucus’ all-too-evident failure to support their choice for leader. That resentment congealed into something approaching despair when it became clear that Little, himself, saw his job as “healing the divisions” within both the Caucus and the Party by more-or-less jettisoning just about every left-wing policy victory that had been achieved since the departure of Helen Clark in 2008.

It was into this dank and sullen slough of despond that Jacinda Ardern descended like a star-shell just a few weeks prior to the 2017 General Election. The Caucus knew that it had no other choice, and the Party was glad it didn’t. Jacinda’s hands were refreshingly clean of fratricidal blood; she made people feel good; and, Jeez! she could hardly be any worse than her predecessors. Hardly! From her very first press conference it was clear that “Jacinda” had been hiding her light under a bushel. From the moment she began to speak, the assembled media’s mouths fell open in frank amazement. Here was a communicator to rival David Lange.

What makes Labour’s decision to dilute the power of the Electoral College so puzzling is that Jacinda Ardern would undoubtedly be elected by Caucus and Party with near unanimous support. For that matter, her most likely successor, Grant Robertson, would, almost certainly, be elected by a similar, unequivocal, margin. For the foreseeable future, therefore, the Electoral College process poses no threat to Labour’s succession planning.

What is it, then, that lies behind the Labour Party organisation’s self-limiting impulses? The answer, sadly, is the general antipathy to the fundamental processes of democracy that characterises so much of the thinking of the Professional and Managerial Class. Since the 1990s, this class has emerged as the dominant social and political force: not only within the Labour Party, but across New Zealand’s public and private bureaucracies.

This frankly elitist mode of governance seeks to achieve two key objectives. The first is to centralise decision-making wherever possible. Handing-off the most important judgements to those with the requisite credentials and experience to make them. The second, related, objective is to insulate and protect these decision-makers from the ill-informed and all-too-easily-manipulated masses. Only in this way can the world (and the Labour Party) be protected from its demagogic Cunliffes. Only then can the ignorant and the importunate enjoy the benefits of its dazzling Arderns.

The tragedy inherent in this narrative lies in its substitution of the broad-based wisdom of crowds for the narrow prejudices of cliques. (A problem all-too-familiar to the National Party!) Expecting a self-perpetuating oligarchy to think beyond its own self-interest is the purest folly. After all, testing the acceptability of a political party’s leadership by regularly submitting it not only to the endorsement of its peers, but also – and more importantly – to the judgement of its members, is, what a properly functioning parliamentary democracy should encourage.

To see demos (the people) surrender kratos (power) to those who put no store by their judgement, is always a distressing sight. Perhaps it is time for the Electoral Commission to take its statutory obligation to ensure that all registered political parties follow “democratic procedures” a little more seriously?

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 8 November 2021.

Radicalising, Renewing & Repositioning Labour: David Cunliffe’s Impossible Mission.

The Party Was Behind Him - Shame About The Caucus: David Cunliffe’s unforgiveable sin – at least in the eyes of his colleagues – was being seized of the need for Labour to reposition itself ideologically. He understood that, in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, social-democracy must either have a rebirth of radicalism or fade into irrelevance. It was not a message that his colleagues wanted to hear. When Cunliffe, despairing of rousing Labour’s parliamentary wing, reached out to the party membership, he sealed his fate.

 

SO, DAVID CUNLIFFE’S LEAVING POLITICS. I’d be lying if I told you I’m surprised. The toxic, soul-rotting environment of the Labour caucus is no place for a rational human-being. In fact, what really surprised me about Cunliffe was how long he managed to endure the company of those “colleagues” whose petty jealousies and unreasoning hatreds inflicted so much damage – both to him and the Labour Party he tried to lead.

 

Some on the left of New Zealand politics have compared Cunliffe to Jeremy Corbyn. Inasmuch as both men have been on the receiving end of an extraordinary amount of poisonous media invective and rank caucus disloyalty the comparison is a sound one. But Cunliffe cannot lay claim to Corbyn’s outsider status. As a highly competent and effective cabinet minister in the Clark-led Labour Government, he moved in the inner, not the outer, circles of his party.

 

Corbyn languished on the back benches of the House of Commons for thirty years, a harmless throwback to the era of Michael Foot and Tony Benn. Cunliffe’s ambition was much easier to spot. That was his undoing. As one commenter on the Labour-leaning blog, The Standard, put it: “David Cunliffe was always the smartest guy in the room. Unfortunately he knew it, and let others know he knew it.”

 

Cunliffe’s other, even more unforgiveable, defect – at least in the eyes of his colleagues – was being seized of the need for Labour to reposition itself ideologically. He understood that, in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, social-democracy must either have a rebirth of radicalism or fade into irrelevance. It was not a message that his colleagues – beset as so many of them were with moral and intellectual lethargy – wanted to hear. When Cunliffe, despairing of rousing Labour’s parliamentary wing, reached out to the party membership, he sealed his fate.

 

In this aspect, also, the parallels with Corbyn are striking. Neoliberalism, it would seem, has no stronger defenders than the legatees of Tony Blair and Roger Douglas. Having defanged their respective labour parties so ruthlessly in the 1980s and 90s, the prospect of social-democracy growing a new set of teeth is one which these children of the neoliberal revolution will do almost anything to prevent.

 

It was Corbyn’s good fortune to take control of the British Labour Party a full five years out from the UK’s next general election. It’s a schedule that affords him just enough time to win the ideological and organisational battles within the party before turning to defeat Labour’s real enemy – the Tories.

 

Time was a luxury David Cunliffe did not have. He won the leadership just 12 months out from the 2014 election. Defeating his internal enemies and the National Party was simply too big an ask.

 

This was the brute fact that undid Cunliffe’s leadership. Torn between honouring his promises to the membership, and preventing his caucus enemies from moving into open revolt, Cunliffe found it almost impossible to make the crucial strategic and tactical decisions that effective political leadership demands.

 

One of the reasons Cunliffe was so reluctant to abandon the leadership in the days following the 2014 election was because he knew how vital it was to finally have the internal fight that the exigencies of waging an election campaign had postponed. By 27 September 2014, however, Cunliffe was in no shape to launch a struggle for the heart and soul of the Labour Party. Emotionally wrung-out, his marriage falling apart, assailed with extraordinary viciousness by his caucus enemies and deserted by even his closest allies, he resigned the leadership and threw what support remained to him within the party behind the candidacy of Andrew Little.

 

Part of the explanation for Cunliffe waiting so long to announce his retirement is, perhaps, that he couldn’t quite bring himself to accept that Little was never going to radicalise, renew or reposition the Labour Party. In spite of the worldwide voter hunger for a principled alternative to the exhausted philosophy of free markets and free trade, the New Zealand Labour caucus’s preference for fudging and fiddling remains undiminished.

 

So David Cunliffe is leaving. Moving back into the commercial world where, in marked contrast to the political world, incompetence is punished and excellence rewarded.

 

Walk away with your head held high, David. You gave it your best shot. The struggle continues.

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 4 November 2016.

Sops To Cerberus *

Red Meat: Judith Collins' return to Cabinet as Police and Corrections Minister is intended to appease National's rural and provincial base. Her hard-line approach plays well with those National voters who feel that the Prime Minister, John Key, has pandered too much to the sentiments of metropolitan voters.

 

WAS JOHN KEY’S DECISION to stand down his Justice Minister, Judith Collins, critical to his 2014 election victory? The National Party was haemorrhaging votes as a result of the extraordinary revelations contained in Nicky Hager’s book Dirty Politics. Collins featured prominently in the book, making her, in the eyes of many, a symbol of all that was wrong with the National-led Government.

 

The bleeding ended abruptly when, pending the outcome of an investigation into yet another spate of allegations, the Prime Minister decided to stand Collins down. (The investigation subsequently cleared Collins of any wrongdoing.) Had she remained in Key’s ministry, National’s numbers may well have fallen to the point where voters began writing the Government off. If Key’s plurality on election night been 43 percent rather than 48 percent, then his ability to continue as prime minister would have been seriously – perhaps fatally – compromised.

 

But, if the standing down of Judith Collins played an important part in securing Key his third term – why bring her back into his Cabinet? In her new role as Minister of Police and Minister of Corrections, Collins is once again displaying all the headstrong and abrasive qualities that made her so unpopular during her first, controversial, stint in Key’s cabinet.

 

Many political scientists would dismiss this question as naïve. They would argue that Key brought Collins in from the cold in order to appease National’s “base”. Collins has become the poster girl for a great many of the deeply conservative National Party voters living in rural and provincial New Zealand. Many of them also belong to the Sensible Sentencing Trust, a powerful lobby group committed to securing harsher penalties for criminal offending and a more Spartan regime for prison inmates.

 

Presumably, National’s conservative base are as much in awe of their leader’s ability to win elections as the rest of the country, but they are less enthused about the price he has to pay for that success. By their reckoning, Key has flung much too sweet a sop to the socially liberal Cerberus who guards the gateway to the crucial metropolitan vote.

 

The persistence of Working For Families (which Key memorably described as “communism by stealth”) and interest-free student loan, rankles with these voters. Similarly, they cannot understand why their government hasn’t “dealt to the unions” after the fashion of Bill Birch in 1991. Nor can they comprehend why the Resource Management Act hasn’t been erased from the statute books. The accusation that Key has adopted a “Labour Lite” strategy for remaining in power strikes a very resonant chord with the party’s conservative base.

 

They are also aware that had it not been for the intervention of Collins and her fellow backbench exile, Maurice Williamson, there is every chance that farmers would have found themselves taking health and safety orders from their own employees, or, even worse, from their unions.

 

Indeed, it was almost certainly that back-bench intervention which persuaded Key to bring Collins back under the protective umbrella of collective cabinet responsibility. As President Lyndon Baines Johnson crudely explained his decision to keep the intimidating FBI Chief, J Edgar Hoover, in his job: “Better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in.”

 

Of course, the unfortunate corollary of LBJ’s metaphor is that, in the situation described, it’s always the long-suffering public who get wet!

 

But what kind of politics are we encouraging when policies unsupported by evidence, and rejected by the wider public, are accepted by the conventionally wise as the price governments must pay to keep their party’s base onside?

 

To hear the Minister for Corrections blithely bat away concerns about overcrowding in our prisons, with glib references to “double bunking”, is chilling. Are there really people out there so bereft of empathy and compassion that they cannot imagine the acute psychological stress (and physical danger) of confining two human-beings in a tiny cell for hours on end? Even in the best relationships there are times when people must have time and space to themselves. Denying individual prisoners all hope of coping privately with the many besetting stresses of incarceration is not only cruel and inhuman, it also reduces significantly the odds of the prisoner’s rehabilitation.

 

National’s base doesn’t care. For rural and provincial conservatives, the tougher the prison regime, and the longer the prison sentence, the better they like it. There is deeply punitive streak running through these voters that is apparent not only in relation to crime and punishment, but also in their expectations of welfare and housing policy.

 

John Key, raised by a cosmopolitan Jewish mother in New Zealand’s second-largest city, and with years of residence in Singapore, London and New York, has little genuine affinity with National’s traditionalist base. Judith Collins is his sour sop to the snarling Cerberus of social conservatism.

 

* sop to Cerberus, give a - an allusion to the story in the Aeneid of the descent of Aeneas into the underworld; he was able to pass safely by the monstrous watchdog Cerberus by drugging him with a specially prepared cake.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 23 February 2016.

One For The Road: David Cunliffe Reminds Labour’s Rank-And-File Why They Voted For Him.

 

WAS IT PURE COINCIDENCE? Just 48 hours before the opening of Labour’s annual conference in Palmerston North, David Cunliffe contributes a blinder of a speech to Parliament’s General Debate. Watching and listening to the speech it’s hard to avoid the impression that the man lumbered with all the responsibility for Labour’s catastrophic 2014 election defeat was using his speaking slot to send a message to the gathering rank-and-file.

 

“If you’ve been wondering why you voted for me back in 2013,” Cunliffe seemed to be saying, “it’s because, when I want to, I can unleash a speech like this.” He had no need to add: “Can anyone on Labour’s front bench say the same?” Because Labour’s members were already asking themselves that question.

 

It’s increasingly difficult to form a clear impression of Cunliffe the politician. Blackening Cunliffe’s name, and trashing his performance as party leader, have played a crucial role in enhancing the shaky legitimacy of the man who replaced him. It has also allowed the party to avoid examining too closely the contribution of other Labour MPs to the 2014 debacle. The stories of Cunliffe’s indecision; his inability to formulate a strategy and stick to it; his obsessive and exhausting micromanagement; these are all that’s needed, now, to explain away Labour’s worst electoral performance since 1922.

 

And Andrew Little (the man whose winning margin was less than 1 percent) has been able to emerge from this carefully constructed narrative as Labour’s unlikely saviour. After a long run of incredibly bad luck, Little is portrayed as Labour’s lucky break. A strong and stable contrast to the unaccountably hopeless Cunliffe.

 

Because that is the contradiction that so many of Cunliffe’s supporters still cannot reconcile: the before-Cunliffe and the after-Cunliffe. The coolly ruthless assassin of David Shearer’s hopes; the man who repeatedly reassured his supporters that he would be leader of the NZLP, and then proved as good as his word. Could he also be the hapless, accident-prone, foot-in-mouth Cunliffe who, as Leader of the Opposition, took Labour from 37 percent in the polls to 25 percent at the ballot-box?

 

Listen to Cunliffe’s speech carefully, and an answer, of sorts, emerges. National’s strategy, which turns out to be exactly the same strategy as that of the Crosby-Textor-advised Conservative parties in the UK and Canada, is to use the Right’s allies in the news media (and the blogs) to destroy the reputation of new Opposition leaders before the public has time to form a firm opinion of their own. Foot-tripped from the very beginning, and unable to establish any kind of secure footing, Cunliffe struggled constantly to tear off the labels being fastened to him from every quarter (including, tragically, by members of his own caucus).

 

Cunliffe does not dispute the facts of his less-than-stellar performance as Labour Leader. There are things he knows he should not have done – or, at least, done differently. All he was trying to say in his Wednesday-afternoon speech was, in essence, two things. First: “You weren’t wrong to make me your leader, because, when I’m good – I’m bloody good!” And second: “I know I stuffed a lot of things up, but, never forget, I had plenty of help!”

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Saturday, 7 November 2015.

With A Little Help From His Friends: Who Is Andrew Little Listening To?

Say What? How ironic it would be if, just as Jeremy Corbyn is showing us how Labour politics can be made to work, Andrew Little threw in his lot with those who have, to date, only shown us how to make them fail.

 

WHO politicians turn to for advice tells the world a great deal about what sort of people they are. Do they go straight for the professionals? Or, do they rely on friends and family? Most importantly, do they seek guidance from people who simply reinforce their prejudices, or are they guided by those who are willing to openly challenge their deepest assumptions?

 

The Labour Party leader, Andrew Little, is a cautious man, and, by and large, he has opted to surround himself with cautious people. Professionally trained, himself, he expects a high degree of professionalism from his staff. As a lawyer, he has a natural  inclination towards following the rules of whatever game he is playing.

 

Persuading Little to take a risk is hard work – but not impossible. His decision to keep on David Cunliffe’s Chief-of-Staff, Matt McCarten, is a case in point. McCarten’s radical reputation would likely have proven too much for Little’s rivals, but his own background in the trade union movement made Little much less prone to an attack of the vapours. McCarten may talk like a revolutionary, but, as the leader of the Unite Union, he always knew when it was time to tie up the attack dogs and seal the deal.

 

Little was also aware of just how much he owed McCarten for his wafer-thin victory over Grant Robertson. It was, after all, McCarten who, like the Praetorian Guards of Imperial Rome, understood the supreme importance of timing in the “transition” from one Caesar to the next. It’s never enough, simply to know when the moment has come to strike down the Emperor who has failed, one must also know around whose shoulders to drape the blood-stained purple toga, and upon whose head to place the golden diadem. McCarten chose Little’s head – and Little knows it.

 

Little also knows that the best service McCarten can offer his leadership is to embrace fully his role as the Emperor’s Praetorian enforcer. This was, after all, the role at which he excelled when he was with the Alliance. In Jim Anderton’s fractious coalition, McCarten was the man who kept the noisy ones quiet, and the quiet ones under surveillance. Little has put McCarten’s head-kicking skills to work in the Labour Party where, by all accounts, he has picked up from where Helen Clark’s fearsome enforcer, Heather Simpson, left off seven years ago. Given the extraordinary lack of discipline in Labour’s ranks since 2008, one is tempted to observe: and not a moment too soon!

 

McCarten, however, will always be an ally of Little’s – not a mate. That title belongs to the man he has appointed his Political Director, Neale Jones. The two men both hail from the Engineering, Printing and Manufacturing Union (EPMU) where Jones served alongside Little, before haring off to the UK and contracting himself to a number of progressive and campaigning NGOs. If London can be said to have a “beltway”, Jones clearly knew his way around it.

 

And therein lies a potentially very large problem. Unlike McCarten, who brings with him the whiff of cordite and a kit-bag full of class-war stories, Jones is very much the political technocrat. In this respect, he is very like his boss: dogged, well-briefed, sensitive to the rules of the game, and thoroughly unimpressed by political passion. Hence Jones’ aversion to rushing Labour into anything. After the disasters of Goff, Shearer and Cunliffe, he believes Labour priorities should, for the moment, be strictly remedial. Not until the public’s lost love for Labour has been restored will Jones be happy to let the party, its leader, and its long-suffering rank-and-file, let fly with a little live ammunition.

 

How, then, to explain Labour’s curious foray into the treacherous territory of ethnicity and foreign investment? Who was it who thought singling-out Chinese investors in a city where Chinese residents make up nearly 10 percent of the population was a good idea?

 

The man responsible for manipulating the leaked Auckland housing statistics into something Labour’s housing spokesperson, Phil Twyford, could use was Rob Salmond. Anyone looking for proof of what can happen to a political party when it allows itself to be persuaded that politics is not an art – but a science – need look no further than the relationship between Labour and Salmond.

 

After a few years teaching at an American university, Salmond returned to New Zealand certain he could adapt the techniques he saw employed by the Obama Campaign to New Zealand conditions. This is the “science” of politics that sends out postcards detailing the voting habits of people’s neighbours, in an attempt to psychologically dispose them towards doing the same. Somehow, Salmond persuaded the Labour Party to unleash these sorts of highly manipulative tactics on the long-suffering New Zealand voter. Sadly, as we all know, his political “science” failed to fire, and Labour’s share of the popular vote declined to its lowest point since 1922.

 

Salmond has recently posted a couple of articles on the Public Address Blog in which he wields his ideological agnosticism like a club against anyone who dares to argue that political parties should “stand for something”. All that matters, according to Salmond, is winning over “the middle” – a political designation, apparently, determined not by geometry, but by opinion polling! How one accomplishes this feat, without sacrificing a political party’s ideological (and hence electoral) coherence, he does not elucidate.

 

Salmond’s overall influence within the Leader of the Opposition’s Office is difficult to judge, but Little should think hard before again taking him into Labour’s confidence. His insistence that there is a road to electoral victory that allows a political party to bypass the ideological commitments inseparable from political conviction; that elections can be won by some sort of tricky “scientific” fix; if accepted by Little and his team, can only place New Zealand Labour in the same sorry position as the British Labour Party under Ed Miliband.

 

How ironic it would be if, just as Jeremy Corbyn is showing us how Labour politics can be made to work, Little threw in his lot with those who have, to date, only shown us how to make them fail.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Saturday, 29 August 2015.

One Tick For Labour Isn't Enough.

Split Decision: Labour’s woeful 2014 Party Vote, at just 25 percent, was the party's worst electoral performance since 1922. Not so well known, however, is the number of votes cast for Labour Party candidates across the country’s 71 electorates. That total, at 801,287 (34 percent!) is 196,752 larger than the 604,535 Party Votes Labour received. If every Electorate Vote for Labour had been matched by a Party Vote, the National Government would, almost certainly, have fallen.

 

IF EVERYONE who voted for their Labour candidate in last year’s election had also given Labour their Party Vote, National would have lost. The discrepancy between the two vote tallies is startling. Everybody’s heard about Labour’s woeful 2014 Party Vote. At just 25 percent, it was Labour’s worst electoral performance since 1922. Nowhere near as well known, however, is the number of votes cast for Labour Party candidates across the country’s 71 electorates. That number, at 801,287, is 196,752 larger than the 604,535 Party Votes Labour received. If every Electorate Vote for Labour had been matched by a Party Vote, the percentage figure alongside Labour’s name on election night would not have been a derisory 25, but a much more respectable 34 – almost certainly enough to have changed the government.
 

Such a huge discrepancy between the Party and Electorate Votes indicates a political party in serious trouble. What it reveals is that where voters are either well acquainted with, or have been introduced effectively to their Labour Party candidate, they are much more likely to place a tick beside his or her name. When it comes to Labour as an entity in its own right, however, the inclination to give the party a tick is nowhere near as strong. In the Christchurch electorate of Port Hills, for example, the long-serving Labour candidate, Ruth Dyson, received 18,161 electorate votes. The Labour Party on its own, however, mustered just 9,514 Party Votes – a whopping 9,205 less than National’s 18,719 Party Votes. Small wonder, then, that 27 of the 32 MPs in Labour’s caucus are electorate MPs, with only 5 coming in off the Party List.

Ruth Dyson, Labour MP for Port Hills: 2014 Electorate Vote : 18,161; 2014 Party Vote: 9,514.

 

Unless this situation is turned around – and quickly – Labour’s electoral performance can only deteriorate. As the party’s well-known and affectionately regarded electorate MPs retire, the assumption that Labour people will replace Labour people is being called into question. Once again, Christchurch supplies the example. The parliamentary seat of Christchurch Central was for decades regarded as one of the safest of Labour’s “safe” seats. True to form, in the 2005 General Election Labour’s majority was 7,836. In 2008, however, with a new candidate, it’s majority shrank to just 935. Three years later, National’s Nicky Wagner took the seat with a majority of 47 votes. In last year’s election National increased its majority to 2,420. Significantly, National’s share of the Party Vote over those four general elections rose from 30.5 to 44.6 percent. Labour will have to work very hard to recover Christchurch Central in 2017.

Nicky Wagner, National MP for Christchurch Central: Increased her majority from 47 in 2011 to 2,420 in 2014.

 

What is to be done? Clearly, the most important issue that Labour must address is the current, very different, perceptions Labour voters have of familiar political faces – like Ruth Dyson’s – and the political face of the Labour Party itself. Inevitably, the face of the Party, per se, and that of the Party Leader become blurred in the minds of the voters. It is, therefore, essential that whoever is Labour’s Leader takes great care of the party’s “brand”. David Cunliffe’s “I’m sorry I’m a man” comment, though well meant, nevertheless inflicted enormous damage on Labour’s image – especially (and obviously) among its male supporters.
 

But if protecting and projecting the party’s brand is an important part of any Labour Leader’s job, having a clear idea of what the brand stands for is, surely, just as important? At the electorate level (and Labour’s electorates are mostly poor, brown and working-class) the local MP is generally perceived as being on “our side” – someone they can turn to for help in times of trouble. That perception of being on the side of the poor, the brown and the working-class once constituted the core of Labour’s brand.
 

That up to twice the number of poor, brown and working-class voters now vote for Labour candidates, rather than the party itself, suggests that their perception of what Labour stands for is very different from what they perceive their local MP to stand for.
 

The needs and problems of elderly folk soak up an enormous amount of Labour MPs’ time and energy – and that’s greatly appreciated. Not so appreciated, however, was Labour’s election promise to raise the age of eligibility for NZ Superannuation from 65 to 67. In the eyes of poor, brown and working-class people, that didn’t come across as a very Labour-like thing to do.
 

Labour’s challenge is to persuade its voters to give it two ticks. But that won’t happen until poor, brown and working-class people can be persuaded that Labour and its local candidates stand for the same things. Offering Labour’s traditional supporters economic policies that look and sound like those of the National Party will not rebuild Labour’s Party Vote.
 

The now demolished Christchurch Trades Hall once bore the graffiti: “You were supposed to help.” If Labour’s not very careful, those words may also become its epitaph.
 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 7 July 2015.

The Greens' "Economic Cred": Hard Won - Easily Lost.

Little Feet: Candidates vying to succeed Dr Russel Norman as the Green Party's Male Co-Leader. From Left: Gareth Hughes MP, Kevin Hague MP, James Shaw MP and Vernon Tava. When tasked by The Nation's Lisa Owen with supplying the answer to a simple economic question, three out of the four candidates failed dismally. His successor will have to work very hard to reclaim even a little of Dr Norman's hard won economic credibility.

 

IT WAS IMPRESSIVE – but it wasn’t real. The Greens’ apparent mastery of economics turned out to be just one man’s – Dr Russel Norman’s – achievement. Hopefully, Dr Norman’s successor will attain an equal level of economic literacy.

 

Because most commentators agree that, throughout John Key’s second term as Prime Minister, the Greens’ co-leader, Dr Norman, easily outstripped his centre-left rivals as the best informed and most articulate economic spokesperson on the Opposition benches.

 

With rare political discipline, Dr Norman acquired a good working knowledge of economics and spoke its language as fluently as Finance Minister, Bill English. Perhaps more so.

 

Quite rightly, Dr Norman had identified the Greens’ unfamiliarity with mainstream economics as a serious weakness. Why should the voters take them seriously if they cannot talk convincingly about the exchange rate’s impact on manufacturing; the effectiveness of the Reserve Bank’s handling of monetary policy; or whether employers are responding adequately to rising levels of worker productivity?

 

It was all very well to talk about a future based on “Green Growth” and “Green Jobs”, but voters living in the here-and-now needed to feel confident that the Green Party understood what was happening in New Zealand’s economy – to their jobs.

 

To become a great artist, it is said, the art student must first learn all the rules and master all the techniques of painting. Only then will he be ready to break all the rules and develop new techniques of his own. Dr Norman clearly believed that the same applied to economics. Only after familiarising themselves with the “dismal science” of classical economics would the Greens be ready to preach the more joyful gospel of sustainability and self-sufficiency.

 

Dr Russel Norman: Big shoes to fill.

 

Dr Norman’s efforts in this all-important sphere of politics did not go unnoticed. Mr Key’s second term had hardly begun when the Parliamentary Press Gallery began referring to Dr Norman as “the real Leader of the Opposition”. This wasn’t solely due to the fact that the Labour caucus’s internal feuding was wreaking havoc upon the Party’s political credibility. It was also about the way Dr Norman, as the Greens’ economic spokesperson, was going head-to-head with the Finance Minister in the House – and not losing.

 

Did all this praise go to Dr Norman’s head? Is that why he raised the possibility that, in a future Labour-Green coalition government, the Finance portfolio might well end up in his own hands? (The very idea was enough to cause serious conniptions in Labour’s ranks!) Was Dr Norman’s much derided suggestion that New Zealand embark on a limited degree of quantitative easing all the evidence his critics needed to prove that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing?

 

Actually, neither of these accusations stack up. Subsequent events were to reinforce Labour’s serious lack of talent in matters economic. And the journalists, so quick to pour scorn upon Mr Norman’s QE proposals, revealed much more about their own, and their government briefers’, ignorance of economics than they did about the Green co-leader’s.

 

In spite of the fact that Labour’s policies on superannuation and capital gains had been in place for more than three years, neither the party’s leader, nor its finance spokesperson, proved equal to the task of selling them to the electorate. A Labour-Green coalition could have done a lot worse than making Dr Norman its Minister of Finance.

 

Not that any of this matters now: not after last week’s edition of The Nation on TV3. In the course of introducing the four candidates competing for the co-leader’s job Dr Norman is stepping away from (Gareth Hughes, Kevin Hague, James Shaw and Vernon Tava) the show’s co-host, Lisa Owen, asked each man to answer a quick-fire question on the economy. What’s the unemployment rate? The inflation rate? The Reserve Bank’s official cash-rate? The economic growth rate?

 

Only one of the candidates, Mr Shaw, even came close to supplying the correct answer. In less than five minutes, Dr Norman’s hard graft over more than three years: his gift of (as Ms Owen put it) “economic cred’”; was needlessly thrown away.

 

None of the questions were difficult. A few seconds on the Statistics New Zealand website was all that they required. That none of the candidates had devoted even this much time to acquiring the answers, makes Dr Norman’s economic literacy an even more singular achievement.

 

Some very hard yards await his successor.

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 20 March 2015.

The Glutton Seagulls: Thoughts On A Friday Afternoon In March.

Discovered instead the glutton seagulls squabbling over crusts - James K. Baxter.

 

LISTENING TO RADIO LIVE, this bloke’s telling Willie Jackson what he’d do to the Aussies awaiting execution in Indonesia.

 

“I’d kill ‘em. Yeah, just shoot ‘em. No problem with that at all.”

 

And I’m thinking, what the hell has happened to us. When did we turn into this sort of country?

 

Because it’s everywhere. This viciousness. This absence of civility. This lack of love. What James K. Baxter called “the crushed herb of grief at another’s pain”.

 

God! Just imagine what our right-wing shock-jocks would make of James K. if he suddenly reappeared to point his prophetic finger at the greasy excrescences who have somehow floated to the top of “God’s own country”.

 

Hell, Baxter was an angry man in the 1960s and 70s. The 60s and 70s! When kids could go to Varsity for free. When a young couple could buy their first house at 25 with a 3 percent State Advances loan. When fewer than 5,000 people were unemployed.

 

In his poem, Crossing Cook Strait, Baxter has “Seddon and Savage, the socialist father” raging:

 

I  walked forth gladly to find the angry poor

Who are my nation; discovered instead

The glutton seagulls squabbling over crusts

And policies made and broken behind locked doors.

 

The glutton seagulls, oh yes, they’re still with us. Still squabbling over crusts. They’ve grown obscenely fat over the intervening years. Too fat now to fly. But just you watch them strutting around their enormous piles of crusts. Running furiously at anyone who comes close. Screeching insults. Their angry voices drowning out the songs of the gentle. The warnings of the wise. Eleanor Catton. Nicky Hager.

 

“Kill ‘em all! I’ve got no problem with that.”

 

I was at Radio Live on Election Night as the seagulls racked up yet another win for gluttony. Saw the Seagull-in-Chief on the TV monitor, his vast wings outstretched in a billious benediction. How the flock screeched. And why not? Their crusts were safe for “Three more years! Three more years!”

 

Sean Plunket, wearing the sort of grin more usually found on the face of a wolf who's finally caught up with his exhausted prey, asked me how I was feeling.

 

All I could think of was James K Baxter’s lines from Pig Island Letters:

 

The man who talks to the masters of Pig Island

About the love they dread

Plaits ropes of sand, yet I was born among them

And will lie one day with their dead.

 

I rode home in a taxi as the skies unleashed sweeping showers of Spring rain across Auckland.

 

Like tears, I thought. Like tears.

 

This essay was posted on The Daily Blog and Bowalley Road on Friday, 6 March 2015.

Repositioning Rightwards: The Political Consequences Of Russel Norman's Departure

Victim Of Labour's Failure: Had they but known it, Russel Norman was Labour's best hope for an uncomplicated left-wing coalition partner. Norman promised the doubters in his party a seat at the table - if Labour could but win the election. Labour's failure rendered Norman's political project untenable. His decision to stand down as co-leader means that the party's long-delayed move to the right can now begin.

 

RUSSEL NORMAN’S DECISION to step down as the Greens co-leader reflects the party’s longstanding determination to reposition itself rightward. For eight years Norman’s personal energy and political discipline succeeded in turning aside the pleas of a clear majority of the Greens’ membership to break the party out of its left-wing ghetto. Only by exploiting to the full the party’s consensus-based decision-making processes was he able to keep it anchored firmly on the left of New Zealand politics.

 

For eight years Norman strove to fashion a Green Party manifesto that was not only compatible with the Labour Party’s policy platform but would, to a remarkable degree, serve as its inspiration. His astonishing and largely successful mission to master the challenges of contemporary economics; an effort which allowed him to participate in policy debates with an authority sadly lacking in his predecessors, and to drag Labour along in his wake, is probably the most impressive achievement of his leadership.

 

It was this ability to render the Greens’ left-wing policies economically intelligible that allowed Norman to spike the guns of the Greens’ very sizeable “moderate” (for want of a better description) faction. The latter had demonstrated its power by installing Metiria Turei as co-leader – rather than the overtly left-wing Sue Bradford – following Jeanette Fitzsimons’ retirement in 2008. Had the rules made it possible, this same faction would have radically repositioned the Greens as an ideologically agnostic environmentalist party of the political centre; one capable of forming a coalition with either of the main political parties.

 

Norman was only able to appease these moderate Greens by holding out to them the promise of real power as members of a Labour-Green coalition government. Following the party’s record level of electoral support in 2011, and the narrowness of National’s victory, Norman's vision, at least initially, looked like a realistic prospect. What Norman could not have anticipated was the Labour Party’s self-indulgent descent into fratricidal factional conflict. Three Labour leaders in as many years destroyed any chance of a Labour-Green coalition. It also fatally compromised Norman’s political position.

 

The intrusion of Kim Dotcom and the Internet-Mana alliance only made things worse.

 

The coup de grace that finally extinguished the Green Left’s survival chances was the Labour Party’s very public spurning of the Greens’ (i.e. Norman’s) invitation to campaign together. Labour clearly regarded the Greens as mad, bad and dangerous to know, a judgement reinforced in the last few weeks of the election campaign when it became increasingly obvious to Green Party members that David Cunliffe was much more disposed to forming a coalition with NZ First’s Winston Peters than Norman and the Greens.

 

The final, ignominious defeat of the Left on 20 September 2014 undoubtedly caused cries of “We told you so!” to reverberate through the Green Party organisation. Combined with the slight, but unexpected, decline in the Greens’ Party Vote (the polls suggested, and the Green leadership were anticipating, an outcome of 14 percent-plus) the Labour Party’s abysmal performance, not to mention its unreconstructed hostility, when the chips were down, towards all things Green, rendered Norman’s position untenable. It sealed his fate.

 

It is highly unlikely that Labour fully grasps what a friend they have lost in Norman, nor how very uncomfortable their relationship with the Greens is about to become.

 

If Labour is lucky, the Greens’ transition from Left to Centre will be gradual. The supporters of Kevin Hague, widely tipped to be Norman’s successor, will be arguing that his accession offers the best chance of taking the party from its present position of political irrelevancy to that of permanent kingmaker in good order.

 

For those who favour a much more decisive break with the traditional Green “brand”, by electing co-leaders who can make a plausible case for representing a Green Party which has moved on from its radical left-wing past, James Shaw is the obvious choice. One has only to look at the official video of his maiden parliamentary speech to realise that this is a very different sort of Green to Russel Norman – and Kevin Hague.

 

Much depends on whether the moderates want to play softball or hardball. If they opt for the latter, then expect to see a full-scale challenge mounted for the Green Party leadership. That would not only entail the nomination of Shaw, but also of the fearsomely capable and articulate Julie-Anne Genter.

 

A Shaw-Genter ticket would constitute a re-branding exercise with a vengeance. Telegenic, articulate, non-threatening and business-friendly, Shaw and Genter would signal in a way no other pairing could hope to replicate that the Greens are ready to take their place at the Cabinet Table – regardless of who holds the lease.

 

Under Rod Donald and Jeanette Fitzsimons, Russel Norman and Metiria Turei, the Greens belonged to the Left. Under its next set of co-leaders, especially if their names are Shaw and Genter, the Greens will belong to whoever offers them the best deal.

 

So long, Russel – you’ll be missed.

 

This essay was posted simultaneously on The Daily Blog and Bowalley Road blogsites on Friday, 30 January 2015.

Defining Dirty Politics

Permanent Interests: If the "Intelligence Community" ever came to the conclusion that an actual, or potential, prime minister is implementing, or, intends to implement, policies inimical to the general and permanent interests of the Crown, then their reaction might very well be to designate the Prime Minister/Leader of the Opposition a “threat to national security” and act accordingly.

 

LOOKING BACK over the most tumultuous election year in our recent history, one phrase in particular stands out: “dirty politics”. Yes, it was the name of another of Nicky Hager’s journalistic interventions, but it quickly became something more than that. For close to half the voting public, “dirty politics” became shorthand for everything that’s gone wrong with New Zealand’s political life.

 

But what actually constitutes “dirty politics”? Are we talking about the normal cut-and-thrust of political existence? The wrong-footing of opponents? The strategic shifts of internal support that mark the rise and fall of party leaders? The calculated exploitation of one’s opponents’ personal weaknesses to demonstrate their unfitness to hold political office? The private, off-the-record and entirely unattributable briefings of journalists to effect any or all of the above? Or, are we talking about something else? And, if so – what?

 

I believe that Nicky Hager’s book, Dirty Politics, was written to highlight something more than the normal cut-and-thrust of political life. In my view, Mr Hager’s intention was to draw the public’s attention to the deliberate use by an incumbent Government of its institutional and bureaucratic power to thwart, mislead and, if necessary, disrupt and discredit its political opponents.

 

The politicisation of our supposedly neutral civil service would be a grave development under any circumstances, but the gravity of such behaviour would increase exponentially should the institutions so politicised turn out to be the armed forces, the security services and/or the police.

 

It is especially important that those state institutions whose fundamental remit is the maintenance and protection of “national security” remain utterly aloof from party politics. Precisely because such institutions have privileged access to extremely sensitive and confidential information, any pursuit of their own or somebody else’s private political agenda could easily result in constitutional catastrophe. Those targeted for destruction would be most unlikely to see it coming and, after the event, would have next to no chance of discovering (let alone proving) from whence it came.

 

The constitutional dangers notwithstanding, there is considerable historical evidence that the national security apparatus of the State is particularly prone to developing and following its own political agenda. In the United Kingdom and its former “Dominions” (Canada, Australia and New Zealand) this propensity to politicisation may be traced back to the relationship of the “Crown” to the elected government of the day. The interests of the latter are particular and transitory, while those of the Crown are general and permanent.

 

What’s more, because the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand are “realms”, ruled (at least nominally) by the same royal family, the relationship between those pledged to maintain and protect the general and permanent interests of the Crown isn’t simply constitutional – it’s personal. Governors-general, military commanders, directors of intelligence agencies and commissioners of police all swear to “bear true allegiance”  not to the Prime Minister of the day, his or her government, or even to the people of New Zealand – but “to Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II, her heirs and successors”.

 

That may appear to be a purely formal constitutional distinction, but should the protectors of national security come to the conclusion that an actual, or potential, prime minister is implementing, or, intends to implement, policies inimical to the general and permanent interests of the Crown, then their reaction might very well be to designate the Prime Minister/Leader of the Opposition a “threat to national security” and act accordingly.

 

“Dirty politics”, in the form of a series of “dirty tricks” conceived and carried out by the security services and/or their agents and “assets” would be the result.

 

In practical terms, this “top-down” variety of dirty politics would entail the security services feeding their own highly disruptive and reputationally destructive material into the normal processes of party-political competition. “Politics-as-usual” is, of course, the perfect cover for such extraordinary interventions. Those who object are easily dismissed as naïve, or even hypocritical. “All politics is dirty politics”, becomes the stock reply: “Everybody’s at it.”

 

Ideologically speaking, such top-down interventions are, almost without exception, the work of the Right, and their principal target is almost always the Left, or those disposed to offer the Left meaningful support. These latter targets may include trade unions; a minor political party willing to enter into a coalition with the dominant left-wing party; a newspaper or broadcasting network commissioning investigative journalism to the Left’s advantage; as well, of course, as the unionists, journalists and/or whistleblowers causing all the trouble.

 

From the Zinoviev Letter to Watergate; from Norman Kirk’s “sinister scheme” to the former SIS Director, Warren Tucker’s, 2011 lapse of judgement; dirty tricks have a way of influencing political outcomes.

 

Dirty politics is more than “politics as usual”. Its true purpose is to make sure that ordinary politics is never seriously threatened by the success of extraordinary politics – or politicians.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 30 December 2014.

Labour Needs To Stop Saying What People DON"T want to hear.

A Freight Train Called Key: On election night 1975 Bill Rowling said Muldoon's landslide victory felt like being run over by a bus. Oh what David Cunliffe would have given for that bus on 20 September 2014!

THE ANGUISH of Labour supporters on election night was expressed mostly in Anglo-Saxon. Polite English just doesn’t have the emotional range for disaster on such a lavish scale.

 

Unquestionably, as political disasters go, this one was a biggie.

 

Bill Rowling told the nation on election night 1975 (when Rob Muldoon sent Labour plummeting to the abysmal depths of 39.6 percent) that he “felt like he’d been run over by a bus”. Oh, what David Cunliffe would have given for that bus! On the night of 20 September 2014, Labour’s hapless leader must have felt like he’d been run over by a fully-laden freight train, which had then stopped and reversed back over him, just to make sure.

 

No wonder the poor fellow behaved bizarrely. When the political historians have to go all the way back to 1922 to find a comparable result, bizarre behaviour is probably the very least that should be expected. Because, sadly, no political leader can come back from a hiding of such career-killing severity. Sooner or later that bitter truth just had to sink home. In David Cunliffe’s case, sooner would have been better, but he got there in the end.

 

And now, of course, we are witnessing the contest to find his successor. Andrew Little, Nanaia Mahuta, David Parker and Grant Robertson are all vying for Labour’s top job while the rest of New Zealand looks on with a mixture of fascination and disbelief. Most cannot fathom why Labour’s caucus and the wider party organisation have opted to set about finding a new leader before determining what needs to be done to get Labour match-fit by 2017.

 

See above re: bizarre behaviour. By resigning the leadership when he did, Mr Cunliffe set in motion a relentless constitutional process that neither Labour’s MPs nor its New Zealand Councillors can countermand. A more rational order of events might have been assured if, on election night, Mr Cunliffe had announced his intention to stand down as leader in six months’ time – thereby permitting a thorough post-mortem of the debacle. But, he didn’t. So, they ain’t.

 

In the absence of any conspicuous rationality, a host of political journalists, columnists, PR specialists, bloggers and academics have hastened to proffer their well-meaning (and not so well-meaning) advice as to how the party might be resurrected. Most of this may be boiled down to: Labour lurched too far to the left. Recovery lies in the centre-ground.

 

Poppycock!

 

Labour’s 2014 manifesto was considerably less left-wing than the manifesto it took to the country in 2011. David Cunliffe may have campaigned for the Labour leadership in fiery left-wing poetry, but he campaigned to become New Zealand’s prime-minister in the dullest, the most uninspiring and, ultimately, the most unconvincing prose.

 

The party’s election strategy, under both David Cunliffe and his predecessors, David Shearer and Phil Goff, had been to woo “soft” National Party voters back into Labour’s orbit. There was nothing remotely left-wing about raising the age of eligibility for superannuation. In fact, it turned Labour supporters off – in droves. The same applies to Labour’s Capital Gains Tax:  a measure which even the OECD has advised New Zealand to introduce!

 

Labour didn’t lose the election because it was too left-wing; it lost because in an election dominated by extra-parliamentary sideshows (Dirty Politics and The Moment of Truth) it failed to get cut-through.

 

How does one get cut-through? Well, for a start, you hire the very best pollsters and focus-group analysts you can afford; you tell them exactly what you’re trying to do; and then you listen to them when they tell you how to do it. That’s what National and its leader, John Key, does – and it works.

 

There is absolutely no point in acquiring accurate intelligence about the electorate’s mood; its likes and dislikes; its hopes and fears; if you then do nothing constructive with it. A political party should never allow its policies to be dictated by polls and focus groups, but when it comes to telling a party how to present or, more importantly, how not to present its policies, they become tools of extraordinary utility. If talking about a specific policy turns voters off, then don’t talk about it!

 

Whoever becomes Labour’s leader needs to understand, precisely, what New Zealanders do NOT want to hear, and stop saying it to them – loudly.

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 24 October 2014.

Anticipating Trouble

Keeping A Weather-Eye Out: If John Key truly wishes to challenge Richard (“King Dick”) Seddon’s record for political longevity, then he should weigh very carefully the costs and benefits of mobilising mass resistance during his government’s third term. Successful prime ministers will always anticipate trouble, but wise ones do not seek it.

JOHN KEY BELIEVED he knew what was in Nicky Hager’s book. He was wrong. Instead of containing a host of embarrassing stories about New Zealand spying on its friends in the South Pacific, and intercepting the secrets of its largest trading partner, Dirty Politics concentrated on matters much closer to home. For nearly a fortnight, the Prime Minister and his advisers struggled to deflect Mr Hager’s revelations. Ultimately, shutting down Dirty Politics required measures of unprecedented severity: the forced resignation of a cabinet minister in the middle of an election campaign.

 

The much ballyhooed “Moment of Truth” proved to be a very different story. Knowing in advance who was on Kim Dotcom’s guest-list made matters considerably easier for the Prime Minister. Long before the “moment” arrived, Mr Key had prepared his defences and rehearsed his attack-lines. Though Glenn Greenwald put on a very brave face for his fellow journalists, the Pulitzer Prize-winner was obviously discomforted by the fierceness of Mr Key’s counter-punching. One can only imagine the mighty sighs of relief (on both sides!) as his plane took off for Brazil.

 

Anticipating trouble is one of the most important skills a political leader can master. Even more important, however, is knowing how to deal with trouble when it arrives.

 

One of the many questions Labour Party members and supporters would no doubt like to put to David Cunliffe is why he was so very bad at anticipating events which were readily predictable.

 

Mr Cunliffe had been a Member of Parliament for nearly three years when Mr Hager’s third book, Seeds of Distrust, unleashed the so-called “Corngate” scandal in the midst of the 2002 election campaign. Would it not, therefore, have been prudent for the Leader of the Opposition and his advisers to prepare for a similar eventuality in 2014? Was there no one in Labour’s ranks sufficiently well-acquainted with Mr Hager to give Mr Cunliffe some idea of what was coming? Of course there were, but they were never asked.

 

Nor was Mr Cunliffe sufficiently flexible as a politician to take advantage of Dirty Politics when it was released. A politician more willing to risk all for the keys to Premier House might have seized upon Mr Hager’s revelations and forged them into a weapon of deadly political effect. But, the moment came … and then it went.

 

What, then, should the Prime Minister, and whoever is unlucky enough to be elected leader of the Labour Party, be anticipating over the next three years? What are the pitfalls Mr Key’s government should try to avoid? What potential problems will his opponents seek to exploit?

 

Education and the Environment would seem to be the most likely arenas of conflict for the National Government. Significant – and politically highly contentious – changes are proposed in the way both New Zealand’s education system and its environment (both urban and natural) are managed. Neither of these vital spheres are lacking in defenders.

 

The powerful teacher unions stand athwart all roads leading towards privatised education. Any attempt to expand dramatically the roll-out of “Partnership Schools”, or strengthen the Government’s “National Standards” regime in the primary sector, will almost certainly be met with concerted union resistance.

 

This may not be seen as altogether a bad thing by Mr Key and his colleagues. The opportunity to strike a crippling blow at the most powerful of the public sector unions may prove too tempting a trophy for a third-term National Government to resist. Plenty of helpful advice on how to beat public sector unionists will no doubt be forthcoming from the Canadian Conservative Party and the US Republican Governors of Wisconsin and Michigan.

 

Would the public rise in defence of the teachers and their unions? Twenty years ago the answer would have been “Yes”. But now? With the anti-union response to The Hobbit dispute in mind, Mr Key might just be willing to roll the dice.

 

Linked as it is in the public’s mind with dirty dairying, mining in national parks, deep-sea oil-drilling and the governments’ (both local and national) support for environmentally damaging and financially dubious irrigation ventures, the reform of environmental legislation will be a wager hazarded for much higher stakes.

 

With Labour crippled – probably beyond recovery – the Greens will be looking to use National’s environmental “reforms” as the springboard for establishing themselves as the only effective Opposition party. In alliance with Greenpeace, they will do all they can to put themselves at the head of a mass protest movement of young and old, rural and urban, Maori and Pakeha.

 

If John Key truly wishes to challenge Richard (“King Dick”) Seddon’s record for political longevity, then he should weigh very carefully the costs and benefits of mobilising mass resistance during his government’s third term. Successful prime ministers will always anticipate trouble, but wise ones do not seek it.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 7 October 2014.

Post Mortem At The Pub

Next Move? "Adapt or go under was the only choice Labour gave us, Trev, and now they must do the same.”

“SO, WHADDYA RECKON, TREV? Is Labour finished, or what? Can you stop crying into your beer long enough to give me a professional political post mortem?”

 

Trevor Bright was used to his uncle’s jibes, he’d been hearing them long enough. Ever since he’d announced that he was off to university to study politics, his Uncle Bruce had made a point of quizzing him on matters political – especially those relating to the Left.

 

“I’m not crying into my beer, Uncle Bruce. Anyone who kept an eye on the polls could hardly have been surprised by the election result.”

 

“Oh, go on with you, Trev! You were always telling me the polls were crap. They only contacted people with landlines, you said. Young people with cell-phones were never contacted, you said. National’s numbers were always 5 percentage points too high, you said. You’ve changed your tune a bit, haven’t you?”

 

“Yes, but I was only talking about a couple of specific polls, Uncle Bruce. The various ‘Polls of Polls’ got it just about spot-on. I looked at those on the Friday night and my heart sank. I knew the Left was in for a drubbing.”

 

“Drubbing? Nephew, that was more than a drubbing, that was a bloody massacre! I heard some bloke on the radio saying that Labour’s come full circle. That they polled about the same as they did the very first time they contested a general election, way back in 1919. Is that true?”

 

“I’m afraid it is, Uncle Bruce. In both 1919 and 1922 Labour polled almost exactly the same as it did a fortnight ago: 24 percent.”

 

“Except that back then Labour was the new kid on the block, wasn’t it? A bit like Values or the Greens – only much more popular. Sheesh, can you imagine how chuffed that lot would’ve been to get 24 percent on their first trot? But Labour’s not the new kid on the block anymore, is it Trev? It’s the 98 year-old geezer on the block. So I’ll ask you again: Is Labour finished?”

 

Trevor knew that there was a lot more to his uncle’s question that a mischievous desire to rark-up his  academic nephew. For many years Bruce Bright had been an active member of the Meatworkers Union. He’d been a leading delegate and was one of the union’s most formidable shed orators. When Uncle Bruce got going, you had to hold on tight to the furniture or risk being blown away. He remembered the Christmas dinner a few years ago when the onetime Labour supporter had really let it rip. It was an indictment he’d never forget.

 

“Labour did it to us, Trevor. Our own party. I remember watching the blokes walking out of the works on that last day; heads down, silent, gumboots scrunching the gravel. And there wasn’t a damn thing that I, or the Union, could do to help them.

 

“The Nats had always put the boot into working people – it was expected. But these bastards, the members of the so-called “Fourth Labour Government”, they’d done much more than that. Right under our noses, they’d restructured the whole damn country. Only when it was too late did we realise that, in the brave new world Roger Douglas had made for us, working people had only two choices: they could adapt; or they could go under. We were on our own.”

 

Trevor looked up from his glass of lager into the full force of his uncle’s gaze.

 

“I’ve a friend in Rongotai, in Wellington, Uncle Bruce, who tells me that in streets which used to return a solid Labour vote, people’s allegiances are now split between the local MP, Annette King, and the National Party. The funny thing is, Uncle, that the people in these streets: highly-skilled, self-employed contractors and their families – some of them living in renovated state houses – used to look upon Labour as ‘their’ party. But on 20 September most of them Party Voted National for the third election in a row. The tragic thing is that most of the families living in the un-renovated state houses didn’t vote at all.”

 

Bruce Bright blinked away tears and tipped back his glass.

 

“Good! Because it’s no more than they deserve. Adapt or go under was the only choice Labour gave us, Trev, and now they must do the same.”

 

This short story was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 3 October 2014.