Cries From The Heart: That young working-class males, growing up in the post-1984 era, were often gripped by feelings of extreme frustration, resentment, anger, worthlessness and despair is hardly surprising. Socially, they appeared to have lost all value; politically, they had become invisible – and utterly without champions.
CAN LABOUR WIN the “Bogan Vote”? Should it even try?
Seriously, if going after the votes of “Waitakere Man” is considered bad, then
pursuing the Bogan Vote must, surely, be worse? And yet, at one time, the
in-work, well-remunerated, union-dues-paying, domestically-settled, family man
– and his sons – constituted the heart and soul of the Labour vote. Indeed, so
irrevocably gendered was the New Zealand working-class vote that the poet,
James K. Baxter, made humorous reference to it in his otherwise bleak suburban
tragedy, Calvary Street:
Where two old souls go slowly mad,
National Mum and Labour Dad.
In 2015, however, Baxter’s stereotype seems all wrong. Fifty
years after the publication of Calvary
Street it is Dad who votes for National and Mum who (maybe) votes for
Labour. In 2015, the self-employed, well-remunerated, domestically-settled,
family man – a.k.a Waitakere Man – is much more likely to vote for the Right
than the Left. His children, if they bother to vote at all, probably do the
same.
Bogans are very different from, and should never be confused
with, the offspring of Waitakere Man. Waitakere Man represents working-class
New Zealand males on an upward socio-economic trajectory. Bogans, by contrast,
represent working-class New Zealand males on the socio-economic skids. They are
the blokes – especially the young blokes – who struggle to find and remain in
even the most poorly-paid employment. Their domestic situations tend towards
the precarious. They rent rooms – not houses – and struggle to both make and
retain strong social connections. That’s why mateship is so crucial to the Bogan
identity; especially mateship built around sporting allegiances and motor
vehicles.
The fathers and grandfathers of 21st Century Bogans were the
men for whom the fully employed, compulsorily unionised, welfare state was,
primarily, constructed. Men of modest educational attainment and limited
ambition who were able, nevertheless, live full and rewarding lives under the
state’s (and their union’s) protection. These were the men who worked for the
state-owned Post Office and Railways; whose families occupied state houses;
whose award-wages kept them, if not in luxury, then, at least, in reasonable
comfort. They were also the Labour Party’s most loyal supporters. That it was
Labour, in the person of Roger Douglas, who destroyed their world and cast them
and their families onto the scrapheap, is the defining Bogan betrayal.
To the sons of these men, growing up in the 1980s and 90s it
must have seemed as if the “new” New Zealand cared about everybody except them
and their dads.
Maori were in the middle of a “renaissance”.
Multi-million-dollar “Treaty Settlements” were being signed. For the coming
generations of Maoridom there would be university scholarships and
trade-training programmes. New business enterprises were planned, and special
housing schemes. Things were looking up – if you were Maori.
For women, too, all paths appeared to lead upward and
onward. At school, the Bogan boys’ female class mates were constantly being
told that “Girls can do anything!” And with the top posts of Governor-General,
Chief Justice, Prime Minister and CEO of New Zealand’s largest company all held
by women, that inspirational feminist slogan seemed no idle boast.
For young, working-class blokes without tertiary
qualifications or readily marketable skills, however, inspirational slogans
were in short supply. The two great institutions which working-class New
Zealanders had constructed to protect and advance their interests: the trade
union movement and the Labour Party; were no longer able or willing to do so.
Labour had been taken over by Thatcherite ideologues in the early 80s. And, in
1991, the public sector unions had voted down the call for a General Strike
against the Employment Contracts Bill. Not that it was the unions of the public
servants, teachers and nurses which were about to be decimated by National’s
union-busting legislation. That fate was reserved for the unskilled and
semi-skilled workers of the private sector. Within a decade, barely one
private-sector worker in ten remained unionised.
That young working-class males, growing up in the post-1984
era, were often gripped by feelings of extreme frustration, resentment, anger,
worthlessness and despair is hardly surprising. Socially, they appeared to have
lost all value; politically, they had become invisible – and utterly without
champions.
Indeed, the opposite appeared to be true. More and more, the
Bogans began to hear themselves described in the most derogatory terms.
Expressions imported from the USA – like “rednecks” and “white trash” – entered
the vocabulary of the Bogans’ middle-class detractors. In a Labour Party almost
entirely purged of its working-class membership, the people who had once
constituted the very heart of its electoral support were increasingly regarded
as the natural enemies of the party’s new, upwardly-mobile, and
socially-liberal apparatchiks.
Only very occasionally, did the Bogans become visible to the
rest of New Zealand. Denied anything even remotely resembling the ennobling
narratives available to Maori and women, they had become little more than the
butt of stand-up comedic humour. With their mullet haircuts and Metallica
T-Shirts, the best they could hope for was to be treated as a colourful Kiwi
sub-culture – something akin to the outcast “Juggalo” movement in the United
States.
And then in 2003, Possum Bourne died. The rally-car champion
had been a hero to tens-of-thousands of Bogan “petrol heads” and they turned
out in vast numbers to bid him farewell. It was a poignant reminder of just how
many young New Zealanders lived below the radar of a society obsessed with
wealth and “winning”. Like the huge Pasifika turn-out for Jerry Collins, 12
years later, Possum Bourne’s mourners were emblematic of a New Zealand
routinely ignored, even denigrated, by those with the power to keep the
spotlight aimed exclusively at themselves.
So, yes, I believe that Labour should try to win the “Bogan
Vote”. Not only because, having ignored them for 30 years, Labour owes them –
big time. But also because Neoliberalism will never be defeated by the social
groups it lifted up, only by those it cast down.
This essay was
originally posted on The Daily Blog
of Monday, 20 July 2015.
