Labour And Housing: The Winning Combination?

"Aww ... He's Good!" The public may have warmed only slowly to Andrew Little, but eighteen months into the job, familiarity is breeding not contempt but an almost reluctant admiration. Like the punters in the old television ad’, the voters have taken a tentative sip of Little, made a face, blinked several times, and then, with obvious surprise, pronounced him “good”.

 

IT’S A LONG TIME since Labour’s prospects have looked so rosy. The stumbles and falls since 2008 have been so numerous and so serious that Labour’s very survival as a party has been called into question. Such profound pessimism has, however, proved premature. The public may have warmed only slowly to Andrew Little, but eighteen months into the job, familiarity is breeding not contempt but an almost reluctant admiration. Like the punters in the old television ad’, the voters have taken a tentative sip of Little, made a face, blinked several times, and then, with obvious surprise, pronounced him “good”.

 

But, a thumbs-up for Little’s leadership, while necessary, is not a sufficient precondition for victory in 2017.

 

To win, a political party must have at least two things going for it. First, and most importantly, its opponents must be failing. Second, it must be able to offer a positive and believable alternative to the status quo. Labour’s already got the first, and its making steady and encouraging progress towards the second.

 

The Housing Crisis – especially in Auckland – is dragging National deeper and deeper into the electoral mire. Partly, this is the result of Phil Twyford (easily Labour’s best performing MP) keeping his boot firmly planted on National’s head. Mostly, however, the Housing Crisis is the obverse side of what, until recently, was the Government’s most valuable coin: Auckland’s crazily escalating property prices.

 

As the so-called “wealth effect” of rising Auckland house prices rippled out from their usual location-location-location in the city’s wealthiest suburbs and into the hitherto “modestly priced” suburbs of Auckland’s electorally crucial West, National’s fortunes rose with them.

 

“Waitakere Man”: that financially flush, but ideologically conflicted, member of a working-class grown increasingly accustomed to the trappings of a middle-class lifestyle; had learned how to appease his conscience by voting for Labour’s electorate candidate, while locking-in his outrageous property valuation by Party Voting National.

 

Auckland’s rising value has also been enough to keep those who, in earlier periods of New Zealand history veered towards racism and xenophobia, politically quiescent. The dramatic influx of immigrants from China and India was accepted by Waitakere Man because he understood that immigration pressures were crucial to realising, or leveraging, the capital gain of his increasingly valuable real estate.

 

Having set this voter recruitment and retention scheme in motion, however, National discovered that it could not be switched-off. The slightest downward trend in Auckland’s house prices would set off a panic that could only end in electoral disaster for the Right. By ensuring that Auckland’s property prices continued to surge upwards, the Government had excluded an entire generation of Aucklanders from the security of home ownership. Waitakere Man might be sitting pretty, but his children, “Generation Rent”, were not.

 

Even worse, the intensifying competition for scarce rental properties was driving the poorest Aucklanders out of the accommodation market altogether. The news that their fellow citizens, whole families, had been reduced to sleeping in their cars, pricked the conscience of even Waitakere Man. Homelessness, rack-renting, the diseases of poverty and overcrowding: these were the evils from which his parent’s generation had been rescued by the First Labour Government. Eventually, the grim realisation struck home. He could vote to increase his capital gains; or, he could vote for the restoration of social equity; but he couldn’t do both.

 

Cue, Andrew Little and the New Zealand Labour Party.

 

By a long overdue stroke of good luck, the Housing Crisis reached political boiling-point in Labour’s centenary year. Even the most cursory backward glance, by even the most historically-challenged voter, could not help but register the signal achievements of Labour’s 100-year-old history.

 

Somewhere, from deep in their knowledge store, New Zealanders recovered at least the salient details of Labour’s story. How a nation battered and bruised by the Great Depression had been put back to work; and how ordinary working families had been securely housed in sturdy dwellings, by the state.

 

Little’s challenge, now, is to devise a housing policy that meets the urgent needs of the homeless; offers Generation Rent their own homes at affordable prices; and ensures that property values across Auckland (and New Zealand) are not permitted to “crash”. Instead, Labour is hoping to gradually flatten out house prices, while incomes are lifted and price-to-income ratios reduced to more rational, and equitable, levels.

 

An explicit strategy of re-uniting the interests of the working and middle classes should lie at the heart of Labour’s re-election campaign. This cannot be achieved by restoring the fortunes of the former at the expense of the latter. Only a massive class alliance can generate the political heft required to secure massive economic and social progress.

 

When Labour deserted its working-class base in the 1980s it entered a moral wilderness. If it abandons the middle class in 2017 – it will stay there.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 12 July 2016.

Intergenerational Mischief-Making.

Natural Allies: What a tragedy it would be if, at the precise moment that the inevitable real-world effects of neoliberalism – poverty, indebtedness, homelessness, precarious and/or under-employment – are manifesting themselves in ways that can no longer be hidden or explained away, the urgently needed political programme uniting old and young was forestalled by a cynical ideological project aimed at setting the Baby Boomers and Generation Rent at each other’s’ throats.

 

A WAR BETWEEN THE GENERATIONS looms, unless we move swiftly and decisively to avert it. Those born after 1966 will be pitted against those born in the first two-thirds of the Twentieth Century – most particularly, that massive demographic bulge born in the 20 years immediately following World War II: the Baby Boomers.

 

The narrative justifying this war is already in play. Among younger New Zealanders it takes the form of a bitter litany:

 

The Baby Boomers, who had everything given to them, are making us pay.

 

The Baby Boomers, who enjoyed state support into tertiary education, employment and housing, have pulled up the ladder after them – forcing us into lifelong debt.

 

The Baby Boomers, who are now in or approaching their 60s, are not only keeping us out of their well-paid jobs, by continuing to work, but also demanding that our taxes be used to fund their superannuation.

 

The Baby Boomers, who are selfish, greedy hypocrites, should be made to pay for the many injustices they have visited upon their children and grandchildren.

 

There’s more than a little truth in these accusations. Certainly the Baby Boomers constituted a significant proportion of the electorate during a period of extraordinary economic, social and political change.

 

But, hold on a moment, couldn’t a series of very similar arguments be constructed by pitting other social groups against one another? Maori against Pakeha, for example? Or Women against Men? And wouldn’t most of us pause before marching-off down those particular roads? After all, people do not choose to be born Male or Female, Black or White – any more that they chose to be born between 1946 and 1966. The other reason to pause, of course, is the very long list of evil consequences that flow from stereotyping whole classes of people. How would those who see nothing wrong in branding all Baby Boomers “selfish” and “greedy” respond to someone branding all Maori “violent” and “lazy”? Or, all women “weak” and “foolish”?

 

There are more than a million Baby Boomers in New Zealand – roughly one quarter of the country’s population. That’s a helluva lot of people! Can every one of them be “selfish”? Are they all “greedy”?

 

Let’s take a look at housing – a subject guaranteed to enrage the members of so-called “Generation Rent”. To hear them tell the tale, every Baby Boomer is the smug owner of multiple properties, as well as the grasping landlord of every young New Zealander condemned to a lifetime of living in other people’s houses. A truly depressing picture – but is it accurate?

 

Unfortunately, there is no legal requirement for landlords to register with a government agency. According to the Minister for Building and Housing, however, there were (as of 5 May 2015) 129,450 landlords who had registered one or more bond(s) with the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment. Which strongly suggests that only about 1 in 10 Baby Boomers are landlords. (And that’s after assuming, almost certainly incorrectly, that every landlord is also a Baby Boomer!)

 

What percentage of all those generations who came before the Baby Boomers were landlords? We might well ask. Was it lower, higher, or about the same? Whatever the correct answer, the above figures demonstrate the rank unfairness of stereotyping people purely on the basis of when they were born.

 

Young New Zealanders need to be very wary of the growing number of individuals and groups who are inviting them to buy into a simplistic and extremely dangerous conspiracy theory. Because the Baby Boomers are no more conspiring to ruin the lives of young Kiwis (who are, after all, their children and grandchildren!) than the Jews were conspiring to ruin the people of Germany. Rather than make war upon their own parents and grandparents, “Generation Rent” should ask themselves the critical question: cui bono? Who benefits from transforming a whole generation of New Zealanders into scapegoats?

 

As the co-authors of Generation Rent, Shamubeel and Selena Eaqub, make clear, the rise of what they call “housing apartheid” is directly traceable to the late 1980s and early 1990s. The same, roughly 30-year period during which the neoliberal reforms of Roger Douglas and Ruth Richardson have, so dramatically, re-shaped New Zealand society.

 

What a tragedy it would be if, at the precise moment that the inevitable real-world effects of neoliberalism – poverty, indebtedness, homelessness, precarious and/or under-employment – are manifesting themselves in ways that can no longer be hidden or explained away, the urgently needed political programme uniting old and young was forestalled by a cynical ideological project aimed at setting the Baby Boomers and Generation Rent at each other’s’ throats.

 

Those who would punish the Baby Boomers for Neoliberalism’s crimes against the Welfare State should first be satisfied that the vicious political marginalisation of their parents’ generation, is not followed by the economic destruction of their own.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 9 June 2015.