Labour Will Not Win With A Yeah-Nah Strategy

Heroic Evasions: Labour needs to be unequivocal in its communications with the electorate. Either it has a plan to prevent their fellow New Zealanders from falling off the economic cliff, or it doesn’t. Either it has a fiscal policy equal to the task of funding that plan, or it hasn’t. Either it will task the citizens of today with stepping-up to their responsibilities, or it will kick the can down the road for future generations to deal with – just as National does.

“TRIANGULATION” – Bill Clinton loved it; Tony Blair loved it; Gerhard Schroeder loved it. Hell! – Since the 1990s, all God’s social-democratic children have loved it! Question is: will Jacinda Ardern and Grant Robertson declare their love for it by adopting a tax policy that hovers harmlessly halfway between National’s “no new taxes” and the Greens just-released policy of welfare reform and making the wealthy pay their fair share? Given the Prime Minister’s rather snooty comments about the Greens making “some fairly heroic assumptions” about the fiscal gains to be expected from their two new steps of Income Tax and their proposed Wealth Tax, I would say that Labour’s getting ready to triangulate like crazy.

Which, if true, should be filed under: “Extraordinarily Short-Sighted and Disappointing Decisions Political Parties Have Made.” Labour cannot win this election by playing it safe. If it tries it will fail. We are not living in the 1990s – when, as Helen Clark liked to say, “a rising tide lifts all boats” – we are living in 2020, when tens-of-thousands of New Zealanders, and millions more around the world, are staring down the barrel of the most devastating economic downturn since the 1930s.

This is no time to play Goldilocks: triangulating frantically to produce a set of policies that are “just right”. This is a time for the righteous language of the Gospel of Matthew (5:37) “But let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil.”

Labour needs to be equally unequivocal in its communication with the electorate. Either it has a plan to prevent their fellow New Zealanders from falling off the economic cliff, or it doesn’t. Either it has a fiscal policy equal to the task of funding that plan, or it hasn’t. Either it will task the citizens of today with stepping-up to their responsibilities, or it will kick the can down the road for future generations to deal with – just as National does.

Maybe that’s why Jacinda sounded so grumpy on this morning’s Morning Report? Because the Greens policy announcements on welfare and tax have made the whole triangulation process ten times more difficult.

For the tactic to work, the distance between the two political poles needs to be relatively modest. When the whole political colour-chart is made up of boring shades of grey it’s hard for the voters to get all that excited. Who’s going to die in a ditch for dark- as opposed to light-grey? That’s the beauty of triangulation: it’s all about limiting the range of electoral choices – not expanding them. Giving voters real and exciting options only complicates matters.

But that is exactly what the Greens have done. They have borrowed from the Welfare Expert Advisory Group’s report to produce a radical programme of income-support which, if properly presented, has the capacity to get young, poor voters up off the couch and into the polling booths. It has also borrowed fiscal ideas from TOP – The Opportunities Party – to construct an alternative to the electorally radioactive Capital Gains Tax. In doing so they have aggressively expanded the distance between the Right and the Left – replacing all that National and Labour grey with a dazzling in-rush of primary colours: red, blue, and bright, bright green.

Poor Jacinda: I’m pretty sure that her own, and Grant’s, preference was to approach the looming economic crisis in the spirit of a military surgeon charged with deciding who should be categorised as walking wounded; who should be treated immediately; and who is clearly beyond help. Economic policy-making in the grim spirit of battlefield triage: heart-wrenching but unavoidable.

But now, with the Greens promising to keep all those without adequate paid employment afloat, being seen to allow whole sectors of the economy to simply bleed-out in a corner, while Labour’s surgeons struggle bravely to save what sectors they can, will start to look pretty damned heartless. Especially when – as they always do – the National Party will borrow every last dollar they can lay their hands on to avoid raising taxes (except, of course, the regressive GST) leaving the matter of debt repayment for the poor schmucks of some future government to sort out.

From Labour’s point-of-view, the most scary aspect of the Greens’ radical renaissance is that it may not stop at welfare and tax reform. What if, between now and the General Election on 19 September they unveil their own version of the Green New Deal? What if they offer the voters something pretty close to a complete re-prioritisation of all the activity that makes up the New Zealand economy? What if they give expression to the widespread hope of people all over the world that the Covid-19 Pandemic will stimulate a fundamental rethink about where we are and where we’re going? What then?

My sense of Labour’s campaign strategy, to date, is that it was all supposed to hinge on presenting Jacinda and her colleagues as compassionately competent pragmatists. The contrast with National: willing to promise anything and risk everything for political power; was supposed to make people opt for the safer pair of hands. That meant “solid” policies – not inspirational ones. If the Blues are threatening to push the country into the red, then grey doesn’t seem so bad.

It all depended, of course, on the Greens not being able to rise above their interminable squabbles over human identity. Seeing their hapless coalition partners as woke and out of touch with Covid-19’s grim realities, Labour was hoping that voters would glance in their direction, register their disappointment, and turn back to Labour. Frustratingly, the risk is now that the opposite will occur: the voters will register Labour’s all-too-obvious intention to play it safe and, disappointed, turn to the Greens for policies worth voting for.

If Jacinda is wise, she will reposition Labour quite a bit further to the left than she was planning to originally. The resulting triangle might look a bit lopsided, but a left-leaning red-green triangle has a lot more going for it than a boring and blurry blue-grey triangle that robs progressive voters of the will to live.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 30 June 2020.

Politics Is About Choices - Not Tricks.

The Squeezed Middle: Employing the political tactics perfected by the American strategists Mark Penn and Dick Morris, Phil Goff is attempting to play both sides against "the squeezed middle" - a phrase which, along with "Soccer Moms" and "Reagan Democrats" has more to do with polling than principle.

　
MARK PENN and Dick Morris have a lot to answer for. Between them they have managed to change the practice of politics in the modern world fundamentally. If you’ve ever wondered why today’s politicians never seem to do anything large or inspiring; or why modern politics appears to revolve around the petty and the paltry; then look no further than Penn & Morris.

It was Mark Penn who invented "Soccer Moms". This wonderfully evocative term was his shorthand way of describing middle-income mothers of young families more-or-less uninterested in political and economic issues – but absolutely committed to the moral and physical welfare of their families. The way to come at these voters, Mr Penn told his client, President Bill Clinton, was not via their back pockets, but through their values. Convince them that you care about the same things they care about, and they are much more likely to vote for you.

This is where Dick Morris enters the picture. His main claim to fame is as the inventor of the political technique known as "triangulation". His advice to President Clinton, as he contemplated his campaign for a second term, was brutally simple. Abandon fixed ideological positions and re-fashion your political message so that it incorporates elements of both the Left and the Right. In other words, if the liberal and conservative ideologies represent the base, your new position should be "above and between them" at the apex of a new "triangular" political configuration.

President Clinton’s ringing declaration that "the era of big government is over" and his support for Republican Party-inspired "welfare reforms" are two of the best known examples of "Clintonian Triangulation".

Political observers in the United States point to President Barack Obama’s latest White House-brokered compromise over bitterly contested tax and benefit legislation as evidence that he has embraced his Democratic Party predecessor’s "triangulation" technique. That President Obama recently played host to President Clinton at the White House has done little to dampen this speculation.

The Penn-Morris combination: intensive and continuous "neuro-personality" polling of the electorate; combined with the constant re-positioning of political parties – to keep them "above and between" the extremes of Left and Right. In the 21st Century, this is simply the way politics is done.

Our own prime minister, John Key, is a master of the Penn-Morris style of politics.

The National Party polls the electorate continuously, accurately tracking the smallest shifts in public opinion and building up "psychographic" profiles of the many (and often quite contradictory) components of the Government’s electoral base. Mr Key follows the results of his party’s polling assiduously – borrowing freely from the policies of both his right- and left-wing competitors to preserve the public’s perception of him as a leader refreshingly unencumbered by ideological baggage.

Labour’s leader, Phil Goff, attempted a little triangulation of his own last Monday with a speech to a gathering of well-heeled Auckland lawyers and businessmen entitled "The Squeezed Middle".

Promising a future Labour Government would "operate within tight fiscal restraints"(a clearly conservative commitment) he also pledged his party to growing "better jobs and higher incomes" (a traditional left-wing objective).

The subject of his speech – "The Squeezed Middle" – is clearly born of the same mixture of demographic and psychographic profiling that gave birth to Clinton’s "Soccer Moms" in the 1990s, and to "Reagan Democrats" back in the 1980s.

The picture it conjures up is one of deep social anxiety and economic insecurity. At its heart is the sort of middle-income family which did well in the boom years, but which now finds itself just a paycheque away from disaster. These are the folk who borrowed heavily – maybe to buy a better house or to set up a small business – and who now find themselves shivering in the bitter recessionary winds.

The "squeeze" they feel comes, on one side, from their fear of falling back into the poverty from which their family only recently escaped, and, on the other, from the pressure of a pitiless economic system that will crush their hopes without the slightest hesitation.

Mr Goff must know that such people are deeply conflicted. Strong believers in free enterprise, their values cast the poor as lazy "bludgers" – undeserving of the vast quantities of taxpayers’ money spent annually on their relief. But, they also know that if the worst happens, and they lose everything, it will not be for lack of hard work. Why doesn’t that count? They ask themselves. Why, when the chips are down, is the banker never your friend?

That’s the weakness of Penn-Morris politics. Power isn’t something that can be triangulated, and polling merely describes the voters’ predicament. Real politics is about making choices.

New Zealand’s problems need solutions: whether they be left-wing or right-wing solutions matters much less than locating a politician with the guts to give them a try.

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 14 December 2010.