Frail And Confused: National Succumbs To Political Alzheimer’s.

"Dammit! Where Did I Leave My Party?" What we saw over the weekend of 6-8 August 2021 was a party which no longer knows how to play the game of electoral politics. Neither its leaders, nor its members, any longer have a clue what’s required of them. They no longer know who they are, what they believe in, or how to reacquire a competitive electoral edge. National has succumbed to the political equivalent of Alzheimer's Disease.

WHAT NEW ZEALAND WITNESSED over the weekend (6-8 August 2021) was the demise of the National Party. That parties are often divided and fractious after a significant election defeat is a fact of political life. Indeed, it would be worrying if passionate disputation was absent from a party’s post-election AGM. People would probably be more alarmed by a party that accepted it defeat by exuding a sort of Zen calm. Not that National was demonstrating anything like Zen acceptance from the Manukau Events Centre.

Proof of the party’s decline was not, however, to be found in either an excess of passion, or the lack of it, but in the sheer political ineptitude of the entire 700-strong gathering. What we saw over the weekend was a party which no longer knows how to play the game of electoral politics. Neither its leaders, nor its members, any longer have a clue what’s required of them. They no longer know who they are, what they believe in, or how to reacquire a competitive electoral edge. National has become frail and confused.

What else but a frail and confused party could possibly have acquiesced in the re-appointment of Peter Goodfellow as its president? This is a man who failed to perform on not just one, but many fronts. After leading the party to its second-worst defeat ever, and insisting on playing a decisive role in the selection of some truly appalling candidates, Goodfellow’s resignation wasn’t just expected – it was required. He needed to supply his party’s 2021 AGM with his own head on a platter – garnished with heartfelt apologies and seasoned with a passionate call for rejuvenation.

That Goodfellow didn’t understand that; that his fellow board members didn’t understand that; that the delegates who replaced the retiring board members didn’t understand that; is all the proof one could possibly need that National has succumbed to the political equivalent of Alzheimer’s disease.

Judith “Crusher” Collins ended-up piling failure upon failure. Either she wanted Goodfellow back, or she lacked the political chops to prevent his return. Whichever explanation is correct, National’s leader emerged from last weekend’s AGM looking stupid, weak, or (more accurately) like an uninspiring combination of the two. Her references to the certainty of sunrises notwithstanding, Collins did not give the appearance of a women who either wants, or expects, to lead her party into the 2023 election. That she may end up doing exactly that will merely confirm that there is no one in National’s parliamentary caucus who could do the job better – or wants to!

Can you imagine Rob Muldoon, Jim Bolger, Don Brash or John Key dutifully reciting this abject excuse for a political pitch to the disaffected and disappointed?

Over the next two years we will engage with experts and the public and you, our members, to develop solutions. We will listen and we will discuss. We will demonstrate we are the Party that can deliver on our promises, and has the ability to deliver solutions for the country’s big problems. Outlining a vision to the New Zealand public. And releasing policy in each of these and other areas as we go.

It is hard to know where to begin with this glutinous heap of political blancmange. Perhaps by re-emphasising that a political party seeks power to implement the policies advanced by its members, and the socio-economic forces those members represent. A viable political organisation contains within its ranks all the expertise it needs to knock the rough edges off the membership’s policy ideas. Moreover, why would any political party worthy of the name want to “engage” with the public? That is what it does every time an election is held! Only when the ballot boxes have been emptied, and the votes counted, does a political party discover whether or not its proffered “solutions” have been deemed equal to the public’s problems.

This is political Alzheimer’s with bells on. National has simply forgotten how to play “Democracy”. It also seems to have forgotten that the Opposition cannot deliver on its promises until it becomes the Government: that the delivery of solutions comes after the people have voted – not before. There is something both tragic and embarrassing in the spectacle of a once great party losing its wits.

National brought it on itself, of course, when the party decided that it could no longer be trusted to play the Democracy game successfully. After the debacle of the 2002 general election, when its Party Vote plummeted to a risible 21 percent, National allowed Steven Joyce to transform it into a sort of electoral holding company.

Instead of living, breathing, thinking citizens, National’s membership transformed themselves into a bunch of largely powerless political shareholders. Henceforth, they would not be turning up to an annual conference. [For readers under 35, annual conferences were where the members of political parties used to gather, in full view of the public, to argue about policy and elect themselves a President and a National Executive Committee.] No, what the Nats turned up to after 2002 was an AGM – where they dutifully rubber-stamped their “Board of Directors’” decisions and cheered-on the CEO. Safe enough when your CEO was a Don Brash or a John Key. Not so safe when your leader was a Simon Bridges, a Todd Muller or a “Crusher” Collins!

The medical experts say that the best defence against real Alzheimer’s is to keep one’s mind as active as possible. At 85-years-of-age, the National Party should be doing everything it can to stay sharp. Reading books, listening to invited speakers with exciting new ideas, writing and thrashing-out policy, debating the great issues of the day, vetting and choosing candidates, and making sure its office holders are up to snuff. Allowing all those jobs to be done by others (and done badly!) is not the way to stay sharp and remain a competitive player of the Democracy game. (At 105-years-of-age, Labour should probably be contemplating something similar!)

Though only a handful of the delegates attending last weekend’s AGM realised it, National was wandering dangerously close to the edge of a deep political hole. If it was to avoid a fatal fall, the party needed to wake itself up with a painful slap in the face. Having slapped itself, National should then have grabbed itself by the scruff of the neck and shaken itself until all the dead wood dropped off. Had it done that, then it just might have found the courage to reclaim its proper role as a living, breathing, thinking political party, in a living, breathing, thinking parliamentary democracy. But, that’s not what it did. Instead, frail and confused, it forgot what and where it was – and fell into the hole.

Which just leaves Act.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 10 August 2021.

Dancing With The 400,000 You Came With.

The Dancing Queen: The lesson delivered was as old as electoral politics itself: Dance with the person you came with. Or, more prosaically: before looking after anybody else, a wise political leader looks after the people who brought her victory.

LABOUR’S 2005 WIN was, in the Duke of Wellington’s words, “a damn near run thing”, and Helen Clark knew it. For most of Election Night the blue line on TVNZ’s Party Vote graph had been ever-so-slightly above of the red. Broad grins spread across the faces of National’s strategists: Don Brash was going to do it! But then, unbelievably, at the last minute, the red line tilted upwards and crossed the blue. The “big South Auckland booths” had come in – and saved Clark’s government.

It would be heartening to record that Labour never forgot the help it received from the Pasifika and Maori voters of South Auckland. Certainly, Clark left her caucus in no doubt, when it met in the aftermath of their narrow victory, that the loyalty of the brown working-class would have to be rewarded. Bread and butter policies – not liberal crusades – must be the order of the day.

By 2008, however, Labour came across as a party more interested in helping Sue Bradford’s anti-smacking legislation across the line, than in building enough state houses to accommodate South Auckland’s poorest families. National’s new leader, John Key, cleverly underscored this perception by visiting the economically-stressed residents of McGeehan Close in Clark’s own electorate. His message was clear: “I haven’t forgotten the brown working-class.”

The lesson delivered was as old as electoral politics itself: Dance with the person you came with. Or, more prosaically: before looking after anybody else, a wise political leader looks after the people who brought her victory.

If Clark didn’t pass that lesson on to Jacinda Ardern, then she should have. And, if she did, how could Jacinda have forgotten it? Because, nearly a year into her second term, it’s becoming increasingly clear that Jacinda is in danger of forgetting who, by delivering her Government its unprecedented parliamentary majority, brought her to the dance.

Conservative political commentator, Matthew Hooton, has put the number of habitual National Party supporters who crossed over to Labour in the 2020 general election at approximately 400,000. It was to this enormous number of voters that Jacinda was speaking on election-night when she promised to govern “for all New Zealanders”. Like Clark in the aftermath of 2005, the present Prime Minister, at least initially, seemed to understand that the hearts and minds of these temperamentally conservative voters were precious. Having won them, she could not afford to lose them.

It did not require a rocket scientist to explain how those 400,000 hearts and minds had been captured. Just one hyphenated word will do the trick: Covid-Nineteen. So long as Labour continues to keep New Zealanders safe from the Coronavirus, those former National Party voters who lifted Labour from 37 percent in 2017, to 50.1 percent in 2020, will not be dancing with anyone else.

If someone hasn’t affixed a post-it note saying: “It’s the pandemic, stupid!” to the PM’s computer-screen, then, quick, do it now!

Because there’s something happening out there in the electorate. It’s probably too much to call it disaffection, but one wouldn’t be drawing too long a bow to call it unease. With the Delta variant of Covid-19 raging across the planet, the Australian bubble on “pause”, and the percentage of vaccinated Kiwis alarmingly small; this government is just one significant community outbreak away from an electorally catastrophic loss of confidence.

Because it’s not as if it’s doing superlatively well on all the other battle-fronts of the political war.

Homelessness and housing affordability are no closer to being brought under control. Only last week the Child Poverty Action Group released a report blaming the Government’s “inadequate” Covid-19 social support measures for tipping a further 18,000 children into poverty.

In the midst of a “Climate Emergency” we are importing more coal than ever, and burning it to keep the lights on.

It is also apparent that, very slowly, the volume of discontent over everything from the “Ute Tax”, to He Puapua, to “Hate Speech” legislation, to contracting the Mongrel Mob to fix the problems created by … the Mongrel Mob … is rising.

While New Zealanders can lift their eyes to the rest of the world and see only danger and derangement, Jacinda’s 400,000 Tories will waltz with her in breathless gratitude. But, just let that danger and derangement cross the border, and see how fast everybody’s dance partners change.

POSTSCRIPT: This essay was penned prior to the release of the latest Roy Morgan and Newshub-Reid Research polls. The sub-40 percent showing of Labour in the former, and the nearly 20 percent drop in support for the Government in the latter, merely confirm the analysis that Labour is in danger of forgetting who its friends are. - C.T.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 6 August 2021.

You’re Wrong Keith: We Have To Do This NOW.

Let's Do This NOW! Elections are won when the electorate’s general preference for prosperity and stability is overwhelmed by its desire to turn the page and begin something new. When simply restoring the same old faces to the same old places no longer seems enough. When obtaining justice for past wrongs; and securing for themselves, and for their children, a different and better future; calls forth from the nation’s voters an unaccustomed measure of courage and daring. (Photo by JOHN MILLER)

KEITH RANKIN IS WRONG about Jacinda needing to lose this election. If that’s what happens on Saturday: if National somehow hauls itself back onto the Treasury Benches; then it is the purest folly to suppose that the election of 2020 will be a Labour walkover. If the Centre-Left cannot win in 2017, then the question that begs to be answered is: “Can it win at all?”

Presumably, Keith is being guided by the historical precedent of the 1969 “nearly-but-not-quite” election; That was the election which Labour lost by 14,000 votes, only to be swept into office three years later in the “It’s time!” election of 1972. Or, perhaps he’s thinking of the “Springbok Tour Election” of 1981, when National secured a two-seat majority in spite of receiving 4,122 fewer votes than the Labour Party nationwide. As happened in 1969, Labour’s narrow defeat was followed by a unambiguous victory three years later in the watershed snap-election of 1984.

If these are the precedents that Keith has in mind, then they deserve closer scrutiny. Especially since Keith’s reason for identifying the 2017 election as the one Jacinda needs to lose is that, in his opinion: “there will be a financial crisis next year … [which Labour] … is ill-equipped to handle … Further, it may take a major financial crisis (with Labour in Opposition) to drag Labour into the present century, just as the 1930s’ crisis belatedly dragged Labour into the twentieth century.”

Leaving aside the fact that Labour was very much a twentieth century political party (founded in 1916) and, therefore, in no need of being dragged anywhere; its failure to win the 1931 general election after close to three years of the most calamitous economic depression in modern history is highly instructive. Certainly, Labour expected to win and was deeply demoralised by the right-wing United-Reform Coalition’s electoral success.

Now, if we follow Keith’s thesis, Labour’s 1931 defeat merely presaged its inevitable victory of 1935. Except that Labour’s 1935 win was more a matter of good luck than good management. In fact, had the New Zealand Right not fallen into bitter factional strife over the best way to deal with the Great Depression, then there is absolutely no guarantee that Labour would have won. Certainly, if the country had had a proportional electoral system (as it does today) then the Centre-Left’s total of 46.5 percent may not have been enough.

Significant, also, in terms of Keith’s thesis, is the fact that, by 1935, the worst years of the Great Depression were over. The nadir had been reached in 1932, when widespread rioting had broken out in all of New Zealand’s major cities. Over the course of the next three years, however, the rapid spiral into misery and hopelessness had slowed. Although, it must be said, things were still very bad, and working-class hatred for the Coalition Government was palpable. Even so, the chance was there in 1935. Had the Right been united, and led by the moderate former prime-minister, Gordon Coates, Labour could have been run very close – and maybe even defeated.

Certainly, the sharp economic downturn of 1967-68 was insufficient to unseat the National Government of Keith Holyoake in 1969. What’s more, by late November 1972, the New Zealand economy was going gang-busters. There was over-full employment, wages were rising ahead of inflation, and the NZ Dollar was worth more than the US Dollar! And yet, in spite of all this good economic news, the electorate turfed-out Jack Marshall’s National Government with nary a backward glance.

Likewise, in 1984. The loud criticisms of his ideological foes in the finance sector and news media notwithstanding, Rob Muldoon’s two-year Wage & Price Freeze had brought inflation down to low single figures, and his Think Big projects in the regions had kept the unemployment rate well below 10 percent. Most impressive of all, however, was the stunning recovery in per capita GDP growth, which, at close to 6 percent, was an astonishing 8 percentage points higher than the recessionary -2 percent recorded the previous year. Not bad for a Polish shipyard!

None of these figures did Muldoon much good at the ballot-box in 1984, however. Attacked from the right by Bob Jones’s New Zealand Party, and from the left (or so we thought!) by David Lange’s Labour Party, National’s vote fell from 38.8 to 35.8 percent. (A surprisingly modest drop – all things considered!) Labour itself, lifted its vote from 39.0 to 42.9 percent. Another modest result – and well below the 48.4 percent share of the popular vote Labour had attracted in 1972 – the last time it won a general election.

The lesson to be drawn from these historical examples is that misery, alone, is insufficient to propel a left-wing party into power. If it was, then Labour would most certainly have been elected in 1931. Nor is economic success the key determinant of electoral outcomes. If it were, then Muldoon, like Holyoake in 1969, should have been able to fend off Lange’s challenge in 1984. [And, before anybody objects that New Zealand faced an economic crisis in 1984, I would remind them that the run on the $NZ was deliberately engineered by Roger Douglas, who “accidentally” left a position paper indicating Labour’s intention to order a devaluation of 20 percent if it won the election, lying on his chair for journalists to find at an election meeting in Auckland. – C.T.] Clearly, Bill Clinton’s 1992 Presidential Campaign Team’s oft-quoted quip: “It’s the economy, stupid!”, isn’t always true.

What is true, I think, is that elections are won when the electorate’s general preference for prosperity and stability is overwhelmed by its desire to turn the page and begin something new. When simply restoring the same old faces to the same old places no longer seems enough. When obtaining justice for past wrongs; and securing for themselves, and for their children, a different and better future; calls forth from the nation’s voters an unaccustomed measure of courage and daring.

The trick, of course, is to prevent that courage and daring from fading away. In this respect, it is not the general election of 1935 that changed New Zealand history, but the 1938 election which followed it. In the three years that separated that first Labour victory from the second, the government of Michael Joseph Savage had laid the groundwork for a genuine transformation of New Zealand society. Effectively, he was saying to the New Zealand people: “Three years is not enough to complete the task we have begun on your behalf. Give us your votes so we can finish the job.”

And that’s exactly what the people of New Zealand did. At an astonishing 55.8 percent, Labour’s share of the popular vote was the highest ever recorded at a New Zealand general election.

What I would say to Keith, therefore, is that Jacinda cannot afford to lose in 2017 – any more than Mickey Savage could afford to lose in 1935. The groundwork, for a fairer, smarter and environmentally sustainable New Zealand in the twenty-first century, needs to be laid over the course of the next three years, so that the true, the irreversible, transformation can take place in the years following the 2020 election. Just as there could have been no 1938 without 1935, there will be no 2020 without 2017.

We have to do this NOW.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 21 September 2017.

Populism With A Smile: The Fourth In A Series Of Articles Examining The Four Main Political Parties.

And A Smile On The Face Of The Tiger: New Zealand has been fortunate in its political encounters with populism. Whether manifested in the Social Credit Political League, the Alliance, or NZ First, Kiwi populist movements have typically been pretty good-natured affairs. Bruce Beetham’s toothy grimace; Anderton’s manic giggle; Peters’ sunburst smile: all have reassured voters of their owners’ fundamentally honourable intentions.

 

DON BRASH has a story he likes to tell about Winston Peters. The Leader of NZ First had just been appointed “Treasurer” and had accepted the Reserve Bank Governor’s invitation to discuss the Exchange Rate. For years, Peters had been thundering away about the New Zealand Dollar being overvalued. Now that he was Treasurer, and his party was all that stood between National and the Opposition benches, Peters was finally in a position to do something about it. As Governor of the Reserve Bank, Brash considered it his duty to dissuade the populist Samson from pulling down the monetary temple.

 

As Brash tells the story, Peters just wasn’t that interested – dismissing the whole issue with one of his trademark grins. A few years later, Labour’s Steve Maharey would excuse his own party’s failure to follow through on a promise with the observation that it was just one of those things you say in Opposition and then forget about in Government. Had the Treasurer anticipated Maharey’s insouciance? For Winston Peters, is the journey always more important than the destination?

 

Throughout his long and eventful career, this curious disjunction between Peters’ fiery pursuit of power, and his considerably less than incendiary application of it, has both infuriated and intrigued his followers. It’s as though, blackballed from the exclusive club of his dreams, Peters has vowed vengeance. Invoking the most dire punishments against arbitrary power and privilege, he’s recruited a vast and menacing army, marched it up to the club’s front door, and incited his followers to smash their way in. Then, having informed his followers that “Winston will take it from here”, Peters carefully replaces the shattered timbers, saunters into to the club bar, flashes the horrified members his most winning smile, and orders … a whiskey.

 

For Peters it has always been about vindication. The National Party refuses to acknowledge his obvious capacity for leadership? Very well, he will prove it to them by forming a party of his own and leading it into Parliament. The Left brands him a racist? Very well, he will take all of Labour’s Maori seats. The advocates of the Free Market insist that “There Is No Alternative”? Very well, he will demonstrate the electoral appeal of NZ First’s paternalistic capitalism.

 

Vindication – but not revolution. That was the Alliance’s problem. Its activist base (and on some issues even Jim Anderton himself) wanted to roll back completely the reforms of Roger Douglas and Ruth Richardson. It was a mistake. The MMP electoral system, which transformed both the Alliance and NZ First into viable electoral propositions, was designed specifically to preserve the status quo – not overturn it. The Alliance firebrands were unwilling to live with the compromises of coalition government. Peters and NZ First, by contrast, resigned themselves to racking-up only small victories.

 

Small – but not unimportant – victories. Making visits to the doctor free for children under six. Securing a “Gold Card” discount scheme for citizens over sixty-five. Gifting them free off-peak public transport. These were the sort of changes that people appreciated every time they took advantage of them. They did not bring the new economic order crashing down, but they did chip away at its ideological pretensions. Peters and NZ First proved that a helping hand could be extended to one’s fellow citizens – without the sky falling.

 

New Zealand has been fortunate in its political encounters with populism. Whether manifested in the Social Credit Political League, the Alliance, or NZ First, Kiwi populist movements have typically been pretty good-natured affairs. Bruce Beetham’s toothy grimace; Anderton’s manic giggle; Peters’ sunburst smile: all have reassured voters of their owners’ fundamentally honourable intentions. Peters in particular, has always taken care to offset his ferocious rhetorical forays into such fraught areas as Maori-Pakeha relations and Asian immigration by offering the public his most mischievous of conspiratorial grins. As if to say: “What did you think of that? Impressive? Good. Just don’t take any of it too seriously!”

 

As the years have passed, however, New Zealand’s “Populism With A Smile” has become increasingly difficult to sustain. In relation to the rest of the world, the Alliance and NZ First were movements ahead of their time. Over the past two years, however, the global populist herds have overtaken us with a feral strength not encountered since the darkest years of the 1930s. And, while anger has always driven populism forward, today’s populists are super-charged with unreasoning hatred and rage.

 

This leaves Peters in a difficult situation. Historically, his aggrieved followers have always allowed themselves to be halted at the gates of power: always willing to “let Winston take it from here.” But, placing himself at the head of a populist movement in 2017 may prove to be an altogether riskier undertaking.

 

This time the people might insist on going in with him.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 27 June 2017.

Allies On The Inside: The Third In A Series Of Articles Looking At The Four Main Political Parties.

Inside Man? Green Party Co-Leader, James Shaw: For the best part of a decade the Greens have been wrestling with the Outside/Insider dilemma. Tired of being ignored by the insiders “who make the important decisions” they have steadily de-prioritised “their freedom to speak their version of the truth”, and devoted themselves, instead, to proving that they are equal to the task of following the “sacrosanct rule”.

 

IT’S ABOUT AS CLOSE to a conversation with the Devil as any decent politician should get. Not that the former Chief Economist of the World Bank, Larry Summers, hails from the infernal regions – far from it! Nevertheless, the question he put to the then Greek Finance Minister, Yanis Varoufakis, contained the choice with which Lucifer, in whatever guise, eventually confronts every person who enters political life with serious intent.

 

So, what was the question that Summers put to the system-challenging Greek economist?

 

“There are two kinds of politicians,’ he began: “insiders and outsiders.

 

“The outsiders prioritize their freedom to speak their version of the truth. The price of their freedom is that they are ignored by the insiders, who make the important decisions. The insiders, for their part, follow a sacrosanct rule: never turn against other insiders and never talk to outsiders about what insiders say or do. Their reward? Access to inside information and a chance, though no guarantee, of influencing powerful people and outcomes.

 

“So, Yanis, which of the two are you?”

 

Varoufakis chose to go on speaking truth to power – and remains an outsider.

 

It would be comforting to believe that the Green Party of Aotearoa, when presented with the same choice as Varoufakis, made the same decision. Comforting. Yes. But it would not be true.

 

For the best part of a decade the Greens have been wrestling with the Outside/Insider dilemma. Tired of being ignored by the insiders “who make the important decisions” they have steadily de-prioritised “their freedom to speak their version of the truth”, and devoted themselves, instead, to proving that they are equal to the task of following the “sacrosanct rule”.

 

This shift, from Outsider to Insider status, is all-too-evident in the way they present themselves to the public.

 

The seven Green MPs elected to Parliament in 1999 were a genuinely radical assortment. When asked to pose for the cameras their response was to clasp each other’s hands high above their heads like a team of counter-cultural prize-fighters who had just – to their utter amazement – delivered a painful left-hook to the Establishment.

 

But, oh, what a transformation 18 years and six general elections have wrought upon the Greens. The May 2017 edition of North & South features an extraordinary cover photo of Green Party MPs and candidates – all of them posed in conscious imitation of Vanity Fair’s annual “Who’s Hot In Hollywood” cover shot.

 

Nothing counter-cultural here. The Green Co-Leader, James Shaw, impeccably turned-out in a sharp business suit, adopts the posture of an up-and-coming CEO. The Green women, shimmering in designer evening-gowns, smile demurely at the camera. As a full-on application for Insider status, the photograph is a little masterpiece. (This time, Lucifer obviously came disguised as the photographer!)

 

If New Zealand’s Greens do achieve insider status at this year’s general election, then their political trajectory should not be interpreted as something unusual. When it comes to moving inside, the inventors of the green brand, Germany’s Die Grunen, have already been there and done that.

 

Born out of the 1980s militant pessimism, Die Grunen’s apocalyptic visions of an industrial civilisation in irreversible decline succumbed relatively quickly to the argument that, in politics, all that really matters is the ability to “influence powerful people and outcomes”. If that meant abandoning the “fundamentalism” of uncompromising planetary defence, for the “realism” of promoting corporate evolution through green technology, then – so be it.

 

The Right’s fear and loathing of the Greens is, therefore, unwarranted. It is also counter-productive. North & South’s cover, alone, should convince political conservatives that the Greens are now a party they can do business with. Indeed, it is the reflexive hostility of those who never met a tree-feller, river-polluter or climate-change-denier they didn’t like, that makes the Greens’ bid for insider status so difficult to sell to its followers.

 

Capitalism has never faced a more serious challenge than the militant environmentalism which its relentless ecological devastation continues to inspire. If the increasingly obvious consequences of global warming are not to become eco-socialism’s most effective recruiters, then the smarter sort of capitalist, along with his/her political representatives, needs to enlist the Greens as their allies on the inside – and quickly.

 

The Greens’ Memorandum of Understanding with Labour expires at midnight on Election Day. How desperately they must be hoping that the electorate delivers enough support to get them safely admitted to the House of Insiders. Those New Zealanders looking for a more uncompromising party of planetary defence will be hoping for a different outcome. Never has there been a greater need for political outsiders committed to prioritising the truth.

 

What the Devil knows, and ambitious politicians forget, is that once admitted to the House of Insiders, the only “powerful people” to whom they can speak the truth are the ones demanding their silence.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 20 June 2017.

Labour Breaking Bad: The Second In A Series of Articles On The Four Main Political Parties.

"Just when I thought I was out ..." The New Zealand Labour Party, like the New York Mafia, is a seething cauldron of thwarted ambitions, petty jealousies and unresolved grievances. Why is the Labour Party so fractious? So willing to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory? The answer lies in the huge discrepancy between what the Labour Party was supposed to be, and what it has actually become.

 

“JUST WHEN I THOUGHT I was out … they pull me back in.” Michael Corleone’s oft-quoted protest from The Godfather Part III could just as easily have escaped the lips of Andrew Little.

 

The New Zealand Labour Party, like the New York Mafia, is a seething cauldron of thwarted ambitions, petty jealousies and unresolved grievances. It takes a Godfather (or Godmother) of exceptional strength and ruthlessness to keep all that bad feeling under control and out of sight. Peter Fraser and Norman Kirk could do it. So could Helen Clark. For a while, Little appeared to be getting the hang of it. Such optimism now seems misplaced.

 

Why is the Labour Party so fractious? So willing to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory? The answer lies in the huge discrepancy between what the Labour Party was supposed to be, and what it has actually become.

 

Just consider the following words – spoken by Labour’s first parliamentary leader, Harry Holland, during his maiden speech to the House of Representatives in 1919:

 

“We of the Labour Party come to endeavour to effect a change of classes at the fountain of power. We come proclaiming boldly and fearlessly the Socialist objective of the Labour movement throughout New Zealand; and we make no secret of the fact that we seek to rebuild society on a basis in which work and not wealth will be the measure of a man’s worth.”

 

These were revolutionary sentiments, which, if repeated outside the House, would very likely have seen Holland charged with sedition. As such, they clearly identified Labour as the party of disruption; the party of discontinuity; the party that everyone yearning to change the status quo could get behind.

 

And get behind it they did. Just 16 years after Holland’s maiden speech Labour became the government.

 

Except that the government Labour formed was very far from being revolutionary (even if an awful lot of New Zealanders believed it really was committed to ushering-in the Red Dawn). By election night 1935, the avuncular Mickey Savage had already spent the three years since Holland’s death methodically smoothing-off the sharper edges of Labour’s “Socialist objective”.

 

Now that the ballots had been counted there was a Cabinet to form, portfolios to allocate, angry rivals to subdue and disappointed friends to placate. There was a civil service to be reconciled with the political party it disdained. Now, Savage’s newly-elected Labour government had to work out how to rebuild capitalist society – without first knocking it down.

 

As the late Bruce Jesson (a political analyst of no mean ability) shrewdly remarked: “The National Party knows how to govern for capitalists; but only Labour knows how to govern for Capitalism.”

 

It’s the paradox that explains Labour’s perpetual state of internal distress. Like the Mafia, all social-democratic governments are obliged to present themselves to their communities as faithful friends and protectors (Godfathers!) even as they organise and grow fat off the very activities that are tearing those communities apart.

 

The trick, of course, is to accentuate the former while drawing a hefty veil over the latter. The corrupt union leader brags to his members about extorting higher wages from their cowering bosses. He does not boast about emptying the Union Pension Fund in return for Mafia muscle.

 

Loyal Labour voters will balk at this Mafia analogy. The very idea that social-democracy involves giving with one hand, while taking with the other, will strike them as outrageous. But this kind of brute transactional politics has always come naturally to the trade unions out of which Labour grew – and working-class voters expect no less. If Capitalism cannot be taken down, then, at the very least, it should be shaken down.

 

Take this too far, of course, and the bosses begin enlisting muscle of their own. When that happens Labour makes a point of being “neither for, nor against” the targets of employer violence. Voters need to understand that this sort of treachery isn’t personal – it’s just politics.

 

Labour’s problem in the 1980s was exactly the same as the Mafia’s. The boss-class finally decided to stop paying. Like the big crime families, the trade unions were taken down. Deprived of their working-class muscle, Labour in New Zealand, and social-democrats all around the world, had little option but to go straight and turn legit. Now it is Capitalism they are pledged to building up.

 

The problem, of course, is that the capitalists already have their own political party. Accordingly, Labour’s current electoral strategy seems to involve: waiting until the National Party runs out of puff, and then presenting itself to New Zealand Capitalism as a temporary alternative government while the exhausted Nats get their breath back.

 

Andrew Little may dream of getting out of this Fake Labour Party, but his dysfunctional political family will always pull him back in.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 13 June 2017.

Keeping The Nation In National - The First In A Series Looking At The Four Main Political Parties.

Face Of The Nation: To an extent that Labour never quite matched, the National Party became the mouthpiece for its class. Its “organic intellectuals” were the lawyers, accountants and producer board grandees who kept the wheels of New Zealand capitalism turning through the third quarter of the twentieth century.

 

MANY PEOPLE WERE SURPRISED at Bill English’s point-blank refusal to order an inquiry into Operation Burnham. What did he have to lose? If an inquiry exposed misconduct in the military, then his decision would have been justified. If it didn’t, then his decision would have vindicated the military’s actions. Either way, it was a win-win proposition for the Prime Minister and his party.

 

Except that no one who understands the origins and purpose of the National Party would ever expect it to sanction anything that might harm the reputation of our armed forces. National is the party of order and tradition; the party of hierarchy: and of the firm belief that there is a right way, and a wrong way, to do things. National is also the party that was pulled together out of the political wreckage of 1935 by former military officers. Colonel H.G. Livingstone, Colonel James Hargest and Colonel S.C.P. Nichols all played prominent roles in the National Party’s formation.

 

From the very beginning, National saw its mission as one of maintaining and, if necessary, restoring the conservative status-quo. Its founding documents speak of the need to “arouse and maintain interest in political matters … and to oppose subversive and other doctrines.” This would require the creation of a mass organisation on a par with the Labour Party’s. In the words of National’s inaugural chairman, Claude Weston: “a political organisation to be of maximum assistance to its members must not be allowed to hibernate, only to wake up on the eve of an election. Like our friends of the Labour Party … we must work day and night; year in and year out.”

 

National proved as good as its word, building up a mass movement that would, within a couple of decades, outstrip Labour’s own. In the countryside, its membership overlapped that of Federated Farmers, the local presbytery, rugby club and school committee. In the towns and cities its members were prominent in the local Chambers of Commerce, Employers’ Associations, Lodges and Rotary Clubs. To an extent that Labour never quite matched, the National Party became the mouthpiece for its class. Its “organic intellectuals” were the lawyers, accountants and producer board grandees who kept the wheels of New Zealand capitalism turning through the third quarter of the twentieth century.

 

When, during the final leaders’ debate of the 2005 general election, Don Brash rather tactlessly equated National Party voters with “Mainstream New Zealand”, he was exaggerating  – but only slightly. So adept has the National Party become at aggregating middle-class interests and opinions that its policies are still widely received as reflections of common sense.

 

But, National’s mission in the final quarter of the twentieth century, and its role in shaping New Zealand’s domestic politics in the twenty-first, was destined to grow increasingly complicated and even, at times, become self-contradictory. As the Keynesian world order began to break down in the 1970s, and as the structural weaknesses of the New Zealand economy were relentlessly exposed – National was forced to maintain its grip on power by tacking aggressively to the left.

 

The essence of Sir Robert Muldoon’s success lay in his ability to combine the cross-class political appeal of unbridled social conservatism with policies grounded in radical economic nationalism. By the early 1980s, however, Muldoon’s Keynesianism-in-one-country had fallen seriously out-of-step with the emerging requirements of a rapidly globalising capitalist system. The Labour Party was thus enabled to present itself as the more effective vector for the urgent economic and social transformations being demanded.

 

The resulting “Neoliberal” regime was to prove almost as destabilising of National’s electoral position as it was of Labour’s. A political movement founded to protect the core values and essential institutions of the New Zealand nation state, was now expected to “sell” the benefits of rampant globalisation – along with its attendant liberal-cosmopolitan cultural values.

 

National’s crucial role in preserving the ideological and cultural unity of the New Zealand middle-class was seriously impaired as international investment and mass immigration continued to both disrupt and displace domestic elites. Winston Peters’ NZ First Party was born out of – and continues to be buoyed up by – the deeply-felt grievances of globalisation’s local “losers”.

 

National’s defence of the national interest now consisted of urging New Zealanders to embrace the logic of globalisation by becoming more competitive, more innovative, and more flexible vis-à-vis the wider world. John Key, the highly successful international currency trader, epitomised the attributes and values of this “new” New Zealander – exuding an easy confidence which persuaded not only National voters, but also large numbers of erstwhile Labour voters, that the Left/Right “tribal” politics of yesteryear had been superseded.

 

The dramatic events of 2016 clearly persuaded Key that the era of post-politics politics was over. With his departure, Bill English faces the daunting task of putting the nation back into National.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of 6 June 2017.

The Better Angel: Why Birgitte Nyborg Beats Donald Trump.

American Cynicism vs Danish Idealism: That the ruthless and corrupt hero of House of Cards, Francis Underwood, so completely captivated American television viewers should, perhaps, have alerted us to the possibility of Donald Trump in the White House. The tremendous popularity of the Danish TV series Borgen and its heroine, Birgitte Nyborg, testifies to the worldwide hunger for a more principled kind of politics.

 

ALONG WITH LEGO, and those foiled-wrapped segments of creamily delicious cheese, Borgen, is one of Denmark’s most successful exports. When the idea of a series about the intricacies of Danish politics was pitched to the bosses at the publicly owned Danish Broadcasting Corporation more than a few eyebrows must have shot up. But, somehow, the show’s creator, Adam Price (one of Denmark’s leading television chefs!) convinced them to back the project – and Borgen went on to wow the world.

 

What made the series so compelling (apart from Price’s intelligent script and Sidse Babett Knudsen’s insightful rendering of Birgitte Nyborg, the drama’s central character ) was the way party politics was presented to the show’s well-off and well-educated audiences.

 

Unlike the blackly comical British series, The Thick Of It, which delighted in portraying the political process and its practitioners as irredeemably corrupt and ineffective, Borgen took as its starting point the historically undeniable ability of the democratic process to improve the lives of ordinary human-beings.

 

It’s an important difference. The Thick of It may be funny, but it is also profoundly disempowering. Nothing good can come from the politics represented in TTOI because none of its characters are in the least bit inspiring. The viewers may laugh at the hugely inventive invective which pours out of the mouth of its anti-hero, Malcolm Tucker, but very few of them would want to inhabit his world.

 

Borgen does not pretend that the political world is without self-aggrandisement and venality. Or that deception, compromise and betrayal are not inescapable aspects of the exercise of political power. But the series refuses to make these the be-all and end-all of the process. In the character of Birgitte Nyborg, Price offers his audience a politician who, through all the vicissitudes of high public office, remains unswervingly committed to the bright bundle of ideals that impelled her into politics.

 

Borgen is empowering precisely because it refuses to validate the cynicism and disillusionment which pervades so many ordinary citizens’ perception of contemporary politics. What makes the series work dramatically, however, is the way Price plays to his audiences’ deep-seated yearning for a politician who refuses to play it safe. A person with enough faith in the intelligence of the voting public to tell them the truth, and enough trust in the essential goodness of human-beings to address her policies to what Abraham Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature”.

 

This is the style of politics that Birgitte Nyborg practices – and Borgen’s audiences love it.

 

Danish Broadcasting is to be commended for Borgen. Not only because it reveals Denmark, a country about the same size as New Zealand, to be deeply committed to the idea that its public broadcaster has a vital role in both explaining and upholding its democratic institutions, but also because it is willing to invest in the creative capacities of its own citizens – to the point of funding a project of Borgen’s scope and scale. Would that New Zealanders were as committed to preserving the public service aspects of their broadcasting system!

 

Because there is a price to be paid for dwelling only on the negative aspects of politics. If voters are encouraged to believe that their political system is “rigged”, and that their political leaders are “crooked”, then they will cease to have faith in the intricate networks of alliances; the complex arrangements of compromises; and the step-by-step fulfilment of promises that is the daily grind of democratic politics.

 

And when that happens: when the voters dismiss the give-and-take of parliamentary politics; the sort of politics that President Lyndon Johnson personified, and which produced the transformational Voting Rights Act of 1965; then they begin to long for a leader strong enough to dispense with the formalities of politics and cut to the chase.

 

Except that a leader who’s contemptuous of complexity and compromise must also be contemptuous of the voters themselves. Because the inescapable fact of human existence is that it is not simple, and that the competing needs of human society are only resolvable by people who are willing to compromise.

 

Compromising does not mean capitulating. This is Borgen’s core message. That compromising is about keeping your own ideals alive by recognising the ideals of others: the rights of others.

 

Rejecting the politics of Birgitte Nyborg, leaves only the anti-politics of Donald Trump.

 

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, 28 October 2016.

A Factoid Is Born

Honestly, John's Victory Was This Big! The ease with which false information can be transformed into an ostensible statement of fact is unnerving. Simply by appearing in print, Steven Joyce's boast to National's annual conference about the scale of its electoral success made the transition from falsehood to factoid.

HAVE YOU EVER witnessed the birth of a political “factoid”?  A fact-what? A factoid, which is defined by the Free Merriam Dictionary as “an invented fact believed to be true because it appears in print.” In this instance, the “invented fact” made its first appearance last Saturday in Steven Joyce’s speech to his party’s annual conference in Wellington.

 

As National’s key campaign strategist, it was Mr Joyce’s job to drum home to conference delegates the extreme political danger of complacency. National must maximise its Party Vote, he warned them, because all of its potential coalition partners are so very, very small.

 

“We have got to look at matching the number we got last time which just happens to be the highest ever under MMP and I think the highest single vote for a party since the Waterfront Strike in 1951.”

 

And there it is – the factoid: National’s 2011 Party Vote was the highest ever under MMP and the highest vote achieved by any single party since 1951.

 

Now a factoid wouldn’t be a factoid if it didn’t bear some resemblance to the truth – and this example is no exception. At 47.31 percent, National’s 2011 Party Vote (and let’s remind ourselves here that the “Party Vote” is a measure specific to the MMP system) was indeed the highest ever recorded. It was also an astonishing achievement. Proportional voting systems hardly ever deliver so decisive a result.

 

Had he been of a mind, Mr Joyce might have expanded upon National’s 2011 performance by pointing out that it was 2.38 percentage points higher than its record 2008 result. After all, how often is it that a party, seeking re-election, actually registers an increase in its popular support? Rubbing salt into the floundering Opposition’s polling wounds, Mr Joyce might also have drawn delegates’ attention to Labour’s best performance under MMP: the modest 41.26 percent of the Party Vote it attracted in 2002.

 

So, National’s record Party Vote of 47.31 percent really is worth bragging about – and that’s a fact. But the second part of Mr Joyce’s boast – about it being the highest vote any party has achieved since the snap election of 1951 – well, that isn’t true at all.

 

Now, to be fair to Mr Joyce, he did only say that he thought National’s was the highest single vote for a party since the Waterfront Strike in 1951. He did not state it as a fact.

 

What he did do, however, and very cleverly, was associate John Key’s remarkable electoral achievements of 2008 and 2011 with the event that stands in National’s institutional memory as the party’s greatest ever victory over the forces of the Left.

 

Held in the bitter aftermath of the tumultuous Waterfront Dispute – New Zealand’s worst ever industrial confrontation – the snap election of 1951 marked the beginning of the National Party’s long ascendancy in post-war New Zealand politics. In the 33 years which separate 1951 from 1984, Labour held office for just 6 years.

 

National’s share of the popular vote in 1951? A decisive 54 percent. Ominously for the Labour Party, that election also took place in September.

 

Perhaps it was the latest Faifax-Ipsos poll showing National on 56.5 percent that reminded Mr Joyce of the 1951 election – the last in which a political party would take over half the popular vote.

 

Which is not to say that Labour and National haven’t in the intervening years come pretty close. In 1972, for example, the Norman Kirk-led Labour Party secured 48.4 percent of the popular vote. National’s Rob Muldoon romped home in 1975 with 47.6 percent. In 1987 David Lange lifted Labour’s 1984 total of 42.9 percent to 47.9 percent. Jim Bolger swept into office in 1990 with 47.82 percent of the popular vote – National’s best effort since 1951.

 

Mr Key’s 47.31 percent was an excellent effort (especially considering it was achieved under an electoral system designed to prevent a single party getting anything like half the votes cast) but it was NOT the highest single vote for a party since the Waterfront Strike in 1951.

 

Except that, by the following day, it was. Overnight, Mr Joyce’s thought had become a factoid, with Tracy Watkins writing in the Sunday Star-Times:

 

“He does not need to remind them either that at 47.3 percent support on election night 2011, National got the highest vote ever under MMP – and the highest vote achieved by any single party since the 1951 Waterfront Strike.”

 

It was that simple – and that quick. And you may be sure this new political factoid will be deployed by National supporters throughout the forthcoming campaign. Let the voters beware, because it won’t be the only one!

 

Oh, and in case you’re wondering, the highest vote ever received by a New Zealand political party was Labour’s triumphant 55.8 percent – way back in 1938.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 1 July 2014.

Gut Reactions

Horizontal Revolution: Labour's (and Labor's) inspirational leaders of the 1960s and 70s, Norman Kirk and Gough Whitlam, both grasped the decisive electoral potential of suburban voters who longed to escape the relentless sameness of their days. The votes of the women who lived in the "Hill's Hoist suburbs" around Sydney were crucial to Whitlam's 1972 victory.

 

GETTING ELECTED has always been the Number One priority of parliamentary democracy. It follows, therefore, that the role of a parliamentary leader is to identify and remove every obstacle to his or her party becoming the government. Partly, that’s a matter of opinion polls, focus groups and communication strategies but, mostly, it’s about a leader’s instinctive feel for the hopes and aspirations, the gripes and disappointments, of the people who have the power to make him or her Prime Minister.

 

It’s John Key’s indisputable ability to divine what’s eating the average New Zealand voter that makes him such a formidable political figure. Yes, he may slip up from time-to-time, say foolish (or downright offensive) things, but always the needle of his political compass recovers the location of electoral North and he’s back on track.

 

Much as I hate to admit it, David Cunliffe simply does not have Key’s knack for staying on course. The Labour leader has many intelligent advisers, a good polling agency, pages and pages of Focus Group reports and (allegedly) a speechwriter. What he doesn’t have, however, is Key’s feel for where the voters’ heads are at; that unerring ability to find true electoral North.

 

What makes me even more depressed is I don’t believe that ability can be instilled. You either have it, or you don’t.

 

Consider the case of Norman Kirk and what he understood about the lives of the people who could make him Prime Minister. Read these lines from the first chapter of the autobiography he began but never finished. The place described is the street in working-class Linwood, in Christchurch, where he grew up.

 

It did not brood. It had no character. Instead it conformed. The people were drab. The street was drab. The people were poor. The street was poor. It was there because it had to be. It had nowhere else to go. Neither did the people. It did not inspire. It was a sponge. It soaked up hope. And at night it counted its people like a warder counts his prisoners.

 

Kirk understood that there were hundreds of thousands of Kiwis who’d been raised on identical streets and, like him, yearned to escape the confinement of such hope-consuming suburbs. In these lines you’ll find no romantic celebration of working-class existence, only a visceral longing for something better; for somewhere else to go.

 

Kirk’s contemporary, Gough Whitlam, understood a very different kind of suburb. The bare, amenity-starved, post-war subdivisions that had sprung up on the outskirts of Sydney in the 1950s and 60s. They were a step-up from the inner-city tenements of the 1930s but the people who lived in them felt almost as constrained as they had in Sydney’s slums. Even in the years of Menzies and the Great Boom there was still so much that was denied to them.

 

Whitlam, alone of all his colleagues in the near-moribund Australian Labor Party, grasped the progressive political potential of the “Hill’s Hoist” suburbs.

 

But first he had to clear all the obstacles to getting elected, and in the Australia of the late-1960s that included the proudly proletarian and staunchly left-wing Victorian Labor Party. On the 9 June 1967, as the ALP’s new leader, Whitlam bearded these socialist lions in their den. In what many Aussie historians consider the best speech of his career, Whitlam addressed directly the defeatist political mindset that had produced eight consecutive Labor defeats.

 

We construct a philosophy of failure, which finds in defeat a form of justification and a proof of the purity of our principles. Certainly, the impotent are pure. This party was not conceived in failure, brought forth by failure or consecrated to failure. Let us have none of this nonsense that defeat is in some way more moral than victory.

 

That killer line: “Certainly, the impotent are pure”, provoked an uproar – but it was a necessary uproar. Because, as Whitlam reminded them: “We are in the business to serve and preserve democracy. Parliamentary democracy.”

 

Kirk and Whitlam understood instinctively the intense dissatisfaction building up beneath the National/Liberal status quo. Both men’s political intestines told them that the Hill’s Hoist generation – and their increasingly restive children – would not remain prisoners of their own streets forever.

 

So, Mr Cunliffe, which obstacles to “getting elected” will you remove? What is your gut telling you to do?

 

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, 13 June 2014.

Outflanked On The Left - By The Voters!

Public Service Notice: Across the Western World there is evidence that the political parties ostensibly standing for progressive change are being comprehensively outflanked by their own supporters - on the Left. Is it possible that the people are becoming more radical than the politicians "representing" them?

 

WITH LABOUR’S POLL NUMBERS FALTERING, there will undoubtedly be much agitated discussion in the Office of the Leader of the Opposition.

 

“What’s wrong with everybody?!” David Cunliffe’s advisers will wail. “Why didn’t anyone like KiwiAssure? What was not to like about a state-owned insurance company? What on earth do people want!?”

 

Well, if the news from abroad is anything to go by, they want a good deal more than the cautious gestures they’ve seen so far. Indeed, if the research published recently in both the United Kingdom and the United States is correct, a substantial chunk of the electorate is willing to embrace economic and social policies that are genuinely and unashamedly radical.

 

A YouGov survey for the Centre for Labour and Social Studies (Class) think tank, carried out at the end of last month, showed that UK voters “strongly supported support state-imposed price controls on the utilities, re-nationalisation of the railways and Royal Mail, an end to private cash in the public sector and even state power to regulate rents”.

 

Putting it bluntly: a solid majority of the UK electorate is well to the left of Ed Miliband’s Labour Party.

 

Nick Assinder, the political editor of the IBTimes, summed up the poll results rather incredulously with the observation: “[I]f the findings continue to be borne out as the general election campaign moves into top gear, and if Labour takes them to heart, it could spark the sort of ideological debate which Britain has not seen since the late 1970s and 1980s – for good or ill.”

 

Something similar would appear to happening on the other side of the Atlantic. New polling from Hart Research Associates, undertaken on behalf of Americans For Tax Fairness, indicates a strong, pundit-confounding, public appetite for imposing higher taxes on the rich.

 

On the liberal website, Campaign For America’s Future, blogger Richard Eskow writes: “As that covert recording of Mitt Romney showed last year, some of the ‘1 percent’ think other Americans aren’t pulling their own weight in this economy. As this new polling confirms, the feeling’s mutual. By a seventeen point margin (56 percent to 39 percent), the American people want the next budget agreement to include new tax revenues from corporations and the wealthy.”

 

One of the reasons David Cunliffe won the leadership of the Labour Party was the widely held view among the party’s rank-and-file that he – alone of all his rivals – “got” this. On the day he announced his candidacy, his “You betcha!” response to a question about raising taxes on the rich had thrilled not just his Labour Party followers, but a large portion of the wider electorate.

 

At Labour’s annual conference, held in Christchurch at the beginning of this month, considerable behind-the-scenes diplomacy went into blunting the sharper edges of policy proposals from branch members and union affiliates who had taken Mr Cunliffe’s radicalism at face value. For the most part, the radicals were happy to oblige – not wanting their man to be embarrassed in front of a sceptical news media.

 

But, if the trends from abroad are any guide, smoothing off the radical edges of Labour’s policy platform was exactly the wrong thing to do. If Mr Cunliffe would improve his political fortunes, he should think about sharpening – not blunting – his party’s attack on the status-quo.

 

The Labour Caucus, too, needs to summon up the courage to abandon what may turn out to have been its entirely unnecessary caution. It is one thing to protect the party leader from stepping beyond the limits of the electorate’s tolerance; quite another to stand between the voters and the radical policies they’re hungering for. Neoliberalism has been weighed in the balance and found wanting – Labour MPs should not attempt to second-guess the zeitgeist.

 

Bill Clinton’s campaign-team’s note-to-self: “It’s the economy, stupid!” has become the stuff of US political folklore – and a potent reminder to stay focused on voter priorities.

 

Perhaps Mr Cunliffe’s note-to-self should be: “Radical policies for a radicalised electorate!”

 

This essay was originally published by The Dominion Post, The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 22 November 2013.

Looking Back - A Sketch

"To the Revolution!"

IT’S THE DAY AFTER the 2014 General Election. We’re at Matthew Hooton’s splendid residence in Parnell and the champagne is flowing. Out in the garden Chris Trotter is holding forth to John Pagani and Matt McCarten when Bryce Edwards steps onto the deck clutching a copy of the Herald on Sunday.

CHRIS: Bryce, you Useful Idiot! Get your arse over here and have some Champagne!

BRYCE: (Waving the paper in front of him) Brilliant column Matt. Just the right combination of triumphalism and spite.

MATT: I try to please.

BRYCE: I especially liked the reference to Shearer’s “Un-lefting of the Left”.

CHRIS: Hardly surprising, Bryce – it’s your concept.

BRYCE: (Blushing) Well, that’s true, I suppose.

MATT: No supposing about it! But how far would the idea have got if Trotter and Pagani hadn’t been around to popularise it?

CHRIS: Or if Shearer hadn’t been smart enough to pick it up.

JOHN: (Winking) No fear of that! It’s amazing what a politician will do with a little encouragement from his friends.

MATT: (Raising his glass) To malleable Manchurians!

ALL: (Clinking their glasses) To malleable Manchurians!

Cathy Odgers approaches the group bearing a tray of Russian caviar.

CATHY: I presume the sort of socialist who’s willing to drink Veuve Clicquot won’t turn his nose up at caviar?

CHRIS: Beluga?

CATHY: Of course.

CHRIS: Lovely!

MATT: So how was the Act bash, Cathy? You must have taken some grim satisfaction at seeing Banksie wiped out in Epsom?

CATHY: Yes and no. It was great to see him defeated – but not by Labour!

MATT: Didn’t I tell you that Shearer had cross-over appeal?

MATTHEW: (Depositing a couple of eye-wateringly expensive Pinot Noirs on the table.) Yes, but that’s only because you bastards were so bloody successful at transforming him into a racist, sexist, homophobic, fascist cunt who made Key sound ideological - while he was somehow allowed to present hard-line communism as economic common-sense.

JOHN: (Perusing the wine label, before pouring himself a generous glassful.) Spoken like a true 1-percenter Matthew.

MATTHEW: Hah! But it won't stop you drinking my wine, will it? Still, what the hell is the Right supposed to do when the likes of Time Magazine makes “The Protester” 2011’s Person of the Year? There were just too many people – like those class traitors Gareth Morgan and Bernard Hickey – who were willing to give all that smelly hippie ‘we are the 99-percent’ crap credibility.

CHRIS: That’s no way to talk about our David. Just because he plays the guitar. (Takes another sip of wine.) This is fabulous Pinot, by the way.

BRYCE: (Excitedly) But Matthew’s right! It was the Occupy movement and the collapse of the Eurozone which finally broke the neoliberal spell. That, and the landslide re-election of Obama on a platform of economic populism. It all conspired to open up the path towards a traditionally left-wing Labour programme.

CHRIS: Which opened the doors of the Labour Party to that most extraordinary of creatures – the ordinary New Zealander.

CATHY: Yes, that was the really clever move. Once the party was pumped full of Trotter’s Waitakere Men it was sayonara for the gaggle.

CHRIS: Ah, yes, the “defenestration” conference. How did Shearer put it: “I’ve worked in places where racial, religious and ideological fanaticism have armed themselves with political power, and I can tell you, the results are not pretty – and offer no models for the New Zealand Labour Party.”

JOHN: Definitely one Trotter’s better lines.

CATHY: You think so? I reckon it was Shearer’s “We must move beyond what George Bush called ‘the soft bigotry of low expectations’; it’s time to stop allowing brown skins to excuse black deeds.”

MATTHEW: Bloody disgraceful racist bullshit!

BRYCE: It worked though. The Identity Politicians all marched out in protest.

MATT: With Robertson at their head!

CHRIS: A definite twofer! And not before time. The Clark Years infantilised Labour’s membership. After the upheavals of the 1980s and early 90s they were so terrified of debate and dissent that they forgot how to think for themselves. And when you do that, there are always plenty of people only too willing to do your thinking for you. (Leaning toward the table.) Is there any of that Beluga still going begging?

BRYCE: And after the big walk-out it was pretty much all plain sailing. Because, in most people’s minds, feminism, gay rights, tino rangatiratanga and bossing people around is the Left. When all those people threw themselves out of the window, “Middle New Zealand” breathed a huge sigh of relief. Chris and John hailed Shearer for “de-Lefting the Left”, John Armstrong picked up the quote in The Herald, and ….

MATTHEW: …. I know, I know, iPredict went mad ….

MATT: … and the polls followed suit.

CHRIS: (Spreading caviar on a sliver of rye bread) Eighteen points in a single bound – Don Brash eat your heart out!

MATT: It was amazing really. When Shearer announced he was going to re-nationalise the privatised assets and re-introduce universal union membership, nobody – apart from Business NZ and Federated Farmers – batted an eyelid. Although, I suppose it helped that Obama was doing much the same thing in the States.

CATHY: And that’s it, isn’t it. Parasites in charge from London to Vladivostok. And after the Chinese Communists’ latest anti-capitalist crackdown, I can’t even go back to Hong Kong!

CHRIS: The trick was to make John Key the voice of ideology, and David Shearer the voice of common-sense.

JOHN: Which we did.

MATTHEW: (Rising from the table.) And so bloody well, you Commie bastards! Why do I keep inviting you to these things?

MATT: Because we're good for business?

CATHY:  What do you mean?

MATT: Exceltium’s been offered the job of softening up - I mean preparing - the country for the restoration of universal union membership. A big PR contract, with a big price-tag to match.

CATHY: (Rising to follow Matthew) Hmmm? Does he need a lawyer?

CHRIS:  What was it Lenin said about capitalists competing to supply the rope that will hang them?

MATT: Comrades. (Rising to his feet and raising his glass.) To the Revolution!

ALL: The Revolution!

This posting is exclusive to the Bowalley Road blogsite.