Leading Labour Off The Big Rock Candy Mountain.

He’s Got The Moxie: Only Willie Jackson possesses the credentials to meld together a new Labour message that is, at one and the same moment, staunchly working-class, union-friendly, and which speaks to the hundreds-of-thousands of urban Māori untethered to the neo-tribal capitalist elites of the Iwi Leaders Forum.

IT’S ONE OF THE LEFT’S favourite games. (And, quite possibly, one of the Right’s as well.) Imagining Aotearoa-New Zealand in “x” number of years.

Over the weekend (18-19/5/24) Labour’s leader, Chris Hipkins, opted for Aotearoa-New Zealand 2040 – the bi-centenary of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi. In a lengthy speech, he described for the delegates to Labour’s Auckland Regional Conference a world in which all of their party’s policies have been brought to fruition. It’s an Aotearoa-New Zealand in which Labour’s political opponents have seen the error of their ways, and nobody is indelicate enough to offer the slightest objection to Labour’s plans.

Nearly a century ago this sort of utopian speculation was the stuff of popular songs. One of the most memorable was Harry McClintock’s 1928 hit, “The Big Rock Candy Mountain”. McClintock was a shrewd enough entertainer to deliver his utopianism satirically:

In The Big Rock Candy Mountains

There’s a land that’s fair and bright

Where the handouts grow on bushes

And you sleep out every night

Where the boxcars all are empty

And the sun shines every day

On the birds and the bees and the cigarette trees

The lemonade springs where the bluebird sings

In The Big Rock Candy Mountains

Hipkins, by contrast, takes himself, and his vision of the future, very seriously. On education, he had this to say:

In 2040 Labour has sparked a love of learning. Kids are in a hurry to get to school, because schools have been transformed. Teaching and learning has been re-focused to bring out the best in every child, rather than stuffing things into them. Schools and teachers have been empowered to reject the 20th century factory model of schooling for one that focusses on 21st century skills like problem solving, creativity, teamwork, adaptability and resilience alongside core basics like reading, writing and maths. Practical life skills like home budgeting, how to prepare a healthy meal, and how to look after your own health have also been taught in schools, leaving kids better prepared for life beyond the school gate.

In other words, Labour’s intention, the moment it is returned to power (with Hipkins at the helm) is to force New Zealand educationalists to once again embrace the discredited pedagogical regime that sent New Zealand’s students tumbling down the international league-tables of effective education.

No longer will New Zealand parents have to worry about their precious offspring being subjected to “the 20th century factory model of schooling”. (That would be the model that guaranteed literacy and numeracy, and “stuffed” kids full of useful general knowledge about the way the world works.) Ahead of the Three Rs, on Hipkins’ twenty-first century Big Rock Candy Mountain, children will learn “problem solving, creativity, teamwork, adaptability and resilience”. Meanwhile, their international competitors in Asia and Africa will be emerging from their school gates with the skills needed to acquire nation-building degrees in science, technology and mathematics.

Confronted with this sort of social-liberal dogma, the criticism that Labour has, like the Bourbon rulers of France, “learned nothing and forgotten nothing”, seems particularly apt. At the upper levels of the Labour Party hierarchy there would appear to be an unshakeable belief that the way forward for New Zealand is both well-understood and well-tested. Election defeats notwithstanding, the party’s policy agenda must remain unchanged.

According to this faction, those who suggest a fundamental re-think of the options Labour has placed repeatedly before the electorate should be ignored. Hipkins and his caucus allies are adamant that the party must not succumb to the pressures of populism. The embittered and ambitious individuals who now control Labour’s Policy Council may propose all manner of radical solutions, but they are all well aware that, as the date of the next election draws near, the power to dispose (as in ‘fix’, ‘decide’ and ‘determine’) will always be reclaimed by the parliamentary party.

In other words, dramatic shifts in Labour Party policy can only be effected by a change of leader, and that, in turn, is only possible following the formation of a party faction large enough to guarantee an easy caucus victory (two-thirds or more) for the challenger. The question, therefore, becomes: Is there anyone in Labour’s present caucus capable of assembling the numbers required to topple Hipkins and turn Labour in a new direction?

A number of commentators have pointed to Kieran McAnulty as a possible contender for the No. 1 spot. Superficially attractive as a leadership candidate, McAnulty has steadfastly refused to deliver even the slightest hint that he is, or might become, a serious candidate for the leadership of his party.

Signalling interest in the top job doesn’t always have to be blunt and obvious, it can be delivered subtly in the form of a joke; by forcefully endorsing developments in “sister” parties offshore; or – most commonly – by denying interest in such a pro-forma fashion that the contrary message is conveyed. McAnulty has done none of these things. When he disclaims all interest in replacing Hipkins, he should probably be believed.

Carmel Sepuloni’s name has also been mentioned as a possible contender. It is, however, most unlikely that such a loyal lieutenant would seek to replace her leader in any circumstances other than his stepping-down from the party leadership voluntarily. Sepuloni has been Hipkins’ fierce and reliable ally for so long that it is stretching credulity to suggest that she might become his challenger – rather than his successor.

Which leaves only Willie Jackson. Alone in Labour’s caucus, Jackson has what the Americans would call the “moxie” to mount a serious challenge. The fact that Jackson straddles three of Labour’s key voting blocs: working-class Kiwis, Māori, trade unionists; equips him admirably, as a left-wing politician, to challenge directly the soft, middle-class centres of Labour’s box of chocolates.

Only Jackson possesses the credentials to meld together a new Labour message that is, at one and the same moment, staunchly working-class, union-friendly, and which speaks to the hundreds-of-thousands of urban Māori untethered to the neo-tribal capitalist elites of the Iwi Leaders Forum. In much the same way as Richard Nixon was the only president who could have successfully sold the USA’s rapprochement with China, Jackson is the only New Zealand politician capable of “selling” a Tiriti-based Aotearoa as the best means of uplifting both working-class Māori and working-class Pakeha.

Labour’s ad campaign for the Māori seats in 2017, in which the urban, working-class lives of most Māori were lovingly depicted, and which secured all seven seats for Labour, points the way. With a minimum of tweaking, the messaging and imagery of that 2017 campaign could reposition Labour in a way which would allow it to shrug-off its “woke” middle-class voters to the Greens. Certainly, if Jackson opted to lead the charge for significant and progressive tax reform within the party, he would have scant difficulty in organising a populist left-wing faction behind him.

At the very least, a Jackson tilt at the Labour leadership would be of huge assistance in bringing the party down off its Big Rock Candy Mountain.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 20 May 2024.

What Would It Take For Labour To Win?

New Leadership For A Rejuvenated Party: Flexible thinking and political courage are the qualities most needed by the New Zealand Left as it campaigns to restrict the National-Act-NZ First Coalition to a single term. For better or for worse, it is the New Zealand Labour Party that will determine whether the Left is successful, or unsuccessful, in its endeavours.

SURVEYING LABOUR’S savagely diminished caucus, only two MPs stand out as credible future leaders: Kieran McAnulty and Ginny Andersen. Before such a combination could accede to the leadership, however, both the Labour caucus and the Labour Party would have to undergo a profound reconfiguration.

For a start, the party membership and a clear majority of the caucus would need to have rejected neoliberalism as Labour’s economic lodestar. The malign legacy of Michael Cullen – for thirty years the party’s ruthless enforcer of neoliberal dogma – needs to be scrubbed off Labour’s escutcheon. Meaning, of course, that Grant Robertson’s legacy (such as it is) would also need to be cleared away. Robertson’s almost childlike dependence on Cullen (especially in the Sixth Labour Government’s first year) meant that new economic thinking had almost no chance of emerging under either Jacinda Ardern or Chris Hipkins.

In the absence of an ideological break-out on a par with the Fourth Labour Government’s adoption of neoliberalism between 1984-1990, there can be no solidity to the radical programme Labour will need if it is to restore its level of voter support to at least 35 percent of the Party Vote. If Labour’s economic and fiscal policies are not being decried as dangerous lunacy by the Coalition Government (as were the First Labour Government’s) then the party and the caucus are not doing their job. Something along the lines of the US Democratic Party Left’s “Green New Deal” and/or the British Labour Party’s “For the Many, Not the Few” 2017 manifesto, would constitute a useful starting-point.

Just getting that far, however, presupposes an extraordinary amount of intra-party conflict. A substantial chunk of the New Zealand Council would need to be replaced. A new and charismatic party president would need to be elected, and a new General Secretary appointed. Only once these bridgeheads were seized could the necessary reforms of Labour’s constitution be implemented. These would restore full control to the party membership over both the choice of the party leader and the formulation of party policy. (No more Captain’s Calls!)

The only possible source for the political heft required to make any of this happen is the Labour Party’s affiliated trade unions – backed-up by the Council of Trade Unions. Something in the form of a manifesto for organised labour, perhaps? A radical document, pointing the way towards reclaiming the Treasury Benches for ordinary working people in three years or less, might be a useful way of mobilising those elements in Labour feeling let down by the party’s parliamentarians. Such a manifesto might also serve as a back-stiffening device for caucus members not willing to wait the six-to-nine years before it could, again, be “Labour’s turn” at the crease.

Fortunately for those who see democratic government as something more than a glorified game of parliamentary beach cricket, the Coalition Government and its policies are certain to drive its victims decisively towards the Left. Even the likes of Hipkins and Carmel Sepuloni will have to at least feign anger and a determination to offer New Zealanders something better than vicious austerity for the poor, and special favours for the Right’s most generous donors. What Hipkins and Sepuloni are likely to discover, however, is that, having climbed on the back of the left-wing tiger, getting off it, uneaten, can be a little tricky.

Certainly, it will not take very long for Labour’s leadership deficit to be cruelly exposed by the surfeit of political leadership to Labour’s left. Against the dynamism and inspiration on display from both the Greens and Te Pāti Māori, Hipkins and Sepuloni will need to be selling the working class and rangatahi something just a little more appetising than bread and butter. It is, arguably, the only good reason for keeping Hipkins and Sepuloni in place: to give them the time necessary to demonstrate their utter incapacity to front the sort of rejuvenated Labour Party that will be required to win in 2026.

Limiting the Coalition’s tenure to “Three Years – And Not One Day More!” is a campaign in which all three of the left-wing parties could participate eagerly. Anticipating the three-party coalitions which now, and for New Zealand’s immediate electoral future, appear unavoidable, Labour, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori could grow comfortable with each other, and gain confidence, by demonstrating their combined political effectiveness to a public growing increasingly impatient with the Right’s performance.

It is even possible to contemplate the three left-wing parties, the trade unions, and Māori organisations coming together in a national hui dedicated to explaining the shape and purpose of the “New Aotearoa” that must now – in the face of the Right’s reactionary agenda – be the core objective of all progressive New Zealanders. Such a gathering would be a wasted exercise, however, if it was not also the opportunity for an open-ended and free-wheeling debate concerning the constitutional shape of the New Aotearoa. If Te Tiriti o Waitangi is to lie at the heart of that new nation, then its defenders must be brave enough to let it face and answer Pakeha fears, even as it carries Māori hopes aloft.

Rather than making a free discussion, even a referendum, about the principles of the Treaty something to be avoided at all costs – up to and including threats of violence if it is allowed to go ahead – wouldn’t the needs of Māori, and the Left, be best served by embracing the process and making it their own? Why not go to the country in 2026 with plans for a full constitutional convention? Why not promote the election of 120 constitutional delegates to draft Aotearoa’s first written constitution – with Te Tiriti at its heart? Where could the Right go then?

The sixth century BC Chinese military strategist-cum-philosopher, Sun Tzu, wrote: “Thus, what is of supreme importance in war is to attack the enemy’s strategy.” The Right has observed the unwillingness of Māori to engage in open debate about Te Tiriti, its principles, and the co-governance it more-or-less mandates, and they have made that unwillingness their strategic target. The harder Māori resist the call for a full debate on the Treaty, the harder the Right will push for that debate to be forced upon them. Their goal is to keep Māori on the defensive. Sun Tzu would say: “Stop doing what your enemy wants you to do. Do what he does not expect, and has not prepared for – embrace the debate, and win it.”

Flexible thinking and political courage are the qualities most needed by the New Zealand Left as it campaigns to restrict the National-Act-NZ First Coalition to a single term. For better or for worse, it is the New Zealand Labour Party that will determine whether the Left is successful, or unsuccessful, in its endeavours.

Paradoxically, the battle against the right-wing coalition can only be fought with any prospect of success after the battle against the right of the Labour Party has been successfully concluded. If Labour is not committed to progressive change, then it will not happen. But, against a united and progressive Labour Party: a Labour Party backed by its allies on the Left, the trade unions, and the rangatahi of Aotearoa; no combination of the Right has ever, or will ever, prevail.

This essay was originally posted on The Democracy Project website on Monday, 18 December 2023.

Game-Changer.

It’s Okay Boomers: Either through careful sociological study, or by pure intuition, Kieran McAnulty has grasped that a substantial number – maybe even a majority – of the Baby Boom Generation can be won away from their fear of a devastating racist backlash. Boomers no longer have to worry about what the older generation will say or do – because most of the RSA Generation are dead and buried. It’s their kids and their grandkids that they should be thinking of now.

KIERAN MCANULTY has changed the game in a way only open to authentic political leaders. Instead of shying away from the challenges of co-governance, he has leaned into them. Instead of hiding behind the obfuscating language of official communications, he has demonstrated the extraordinary power of a simple “Yes” or “No”. What’s more, he has done all this in the accents of an ordinary Kiwi bloke. Kieran McAnulty is the person Chris Hipkins is trying to be.

Sticking up for the Treaty of Waitangi was always the winning response for the Sixth Labour Government. Most New Zealanders are justifiably proud of their country’s efforts to offer the indigenous Māori a measure of redress for the injustices heaped upon them during the creation of the settler-state called New Zealand. It is, of course, true that not all New Zealanders feel this way, but those who reject the promises of the Treaty grow fewer in number with every passing year. Young New Zealand, the demographic fast embracing “Aotearoa” as their nation, believe in the Treaty – and will fight for it.

McAnulty gets this because, at just 38 years-of-age, he’s a member of that younger demographic. The Baby Boom generation came of political age under the shadow of a racist majority. The majority Rob Muldoon knew he could count on in 1975 and 1981. The reactionary social formation that was still there in great numbers back in 2004 when Don Brash delivered his in/famous Orewa Speech. The prime motivator of Helen Clark’s ruthless response to the Court of Appeal’s decision on the foreshore and seabed. But McAnulty, alongside many others in Labour’s caucus, is two generations away from the politicians who were young in the 1960s and 70s. That world has gone – just as gaslight and gaiters had departed the world of the post-war generation.

So why didn’t Gen-Xers like Jacinda Ardern, Grant Robertson and Chris Hipkins lean-in to the co-governance debate like McAnulty? One possible explanation is that they were never able to shake-off their fear that the Big Racist Monster was still out there, still capable of upending progressive governments. They had, after all, seen at close hand Clark’s reaction to the post-Orewa polls. They had been witnesses, not only to the Labour leader’s fear of a Pakeha racist backlash, but also to her antipathy towards the “haters and wreckers” of Māori nationalism. Those sort of experiences leave a deep impression.

For McAnulty, however, they are yesterday’s political calculations. Either through careful sociological study, or by pure intuition, he has grasped what so many of his colleagues have not. That a substantial number – maybe even a majority – of the Baby Boomers can be won away from their fear of the Big Racist Monster. That the people who marched against the Vietnam War, protested the Springbok Tour, and organised for a nuclear-free New Zealand no longer have to worry about what the older generation will say or do – because most of the RSA Generation are dead and buried. It’s their kids and their grandkids that the Boomers should be thinking of now.

McAnulty’s other key insight is that when younger New Zealanders hear the word “democracy” their reaction is often quite different from that of their parents and grandparents. Democracy was what the Baby Boomers parents had fought for during the Second World War. It was the precious heirloom of the “Free World” through all the years of the Cold War. For the young New Zealanders who grew up in the shadow of Roger Douglas and Ruth Richardson, however, democracy has been subjected to an altogether more robust interrogation.

It was under democracy that the New Zealand trade union movement was gutted, and never allowed to recover. It was under democracy that the welfare state became as cold as charity. It was democracy that looked at global warming – and did nothing. Democracy that denied an entire generation their own affordable home. Democracy that allowed big corporations to wreck the New Zealand environment, and then take their profits offshore. Sure, you could vote, once every three years, but nothing ever seemed to change. Democracy might have done plenty for their grandparents’ and parents’ generations, but it has done bugger-all for theirs.

When older New Zealanders look at co-governance they are prone to see the demise of one-person, one-vote. But young New Zealanders look at the mess local government has made of their cities and towns, rivers and forests; they think about the way farming and business interests always seem to get what they want – often at the expense of everybody and everything else; and they ask themselves: Could the Māori make a worse job of looking after Aotearoa than Pakeha democracy? Could co-governance with mana whenua be any worse than co-governance with capitalists?

McAnulty has, quite rightly, pointed out that New Zealand has developed its own version of democracy. That it is steadily moving towards a way of governing that sees achieving consensus as preferable to, and certainly more sensible than, a 50 percent+1 tyranny of the majority. Both Māori and Pakeha are talking about a constitution based on the Treaty of Waitangi, rather than the Westminster system, might look like. Ways forward that follow the paths already laid down in numerous Treaty settlements. A system of governance based on the peoples we are becoming, rather than the far-from-democratic institutions the British colonisers brought with them.

If McAnulty’s colleagues have the courage to follow his lead, then the looming election may yet become an historical turning-point. With National and Act offering nothing more than more of the same, Labour, the Greens, and Te Pāti Māori have been given the chance to join the most progressive elements of the older generations with the hopes and aspirations of younger New Zealanders, thereby forging an electoral alliance equal to the challenges of an uncertain and demanding future.

More than quarter-of-a-century ago, I concluded a feature article entitled “The Struggle For Sovereignty”, written for New Zealand Political Review, with the following sentences:

New Zealanders are heading into a great storm of change. Much that is precious to us will pass away. As Pakeha we have grown accustomed to being the colonisers rather than the colonised. Loss of power will be a new experience for us. As the second great wave of colonisation washes over us, our best chance of survival will be to reach out for the hands of the tangata whenua – whose feet are sunk deepest in the earth of Aotearoa. In the storm of change that is coming, the strength which that position gives to Māori will make them the only solid point around which everything else twists and turns. If we, as Pakeha, do not reach out and grasp that strength, the fury of the storm will blow us far away.

That storm is now upon us.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 18 April 2023.

Following Labour's Lead.

Red And Proud: The only real question, after Thursday’s Budget, is: How long will it take National to realise how profoundly the political game has been – and is being – transformed by Covid and Climate Change? Socialism is no longer a dirty word.

YOU HAVE TO ADMIT, Judith Collins made a reasonable fist of responding to Grant Robertson’s 2021 Budget. It wasn’t enough, of course. It would have required a truly Churchillian performance to dispel the magic of Robertson’s speech. Labour has well-and-truly learned what National appears to have forgotten: that people feel long before they think. And Robertson had just made a goodly portion of the New Zealand electorate feel righteous. As performances go, his was a bloody hard act to follow.

Still, the leader of the Opposition has not forgotten how to use her sword. Her thrust against “Meccano lessons” at the Hillside Workshops was deadly. Unfortunately, she failed to follow it up with an equally devastating assault upon the whole import substitution policy to which Robertson’s proudly proletarian pitch paid homage. There was, after all, a reason why Labour, in the early 1980s, began casting around for something to replace the Sutchism that had dominated Labour’s policy-making since the late-1950s.

It is one of New Zealand political history’s greatest ironies that Rob Muldoon, the “Young Turk” who won his spurs attacking the massive import substitution programme unleashed by the Second Labour Government, should have ended his career amidst the wreckage of “Think Big” – as he called his own updating of the left-leaning economist, civil servant and historian, Bill Sutch’s, radical economic development policies.

Indeed, it is interesting to speculate on what might have happened if Muldoon had remained true to the instincts of his younger, private-enterprise self, by continuing to reject state-directed development in New Zealand. Had Muldoon embraced the same ideas as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the late-1970s and the early-1980s, it could easily have been Labour which ended up betting the farm on one last roll of Sutch’s dice.

As things turned out, it was Labour’s new leader, David Lange, who found himself proclaiming that New Zealand couldn’t go on being run “like a Polish shipyard”. Egged-on by his Treasury advisers, and the smarter elements of the Fourth Estate, he was persuaded to join his backers (Roger Douglas, Michael Basset, Mike Moore and Richard Prebble) in “thinking the unthinkable” about New Zealand’s economic future.

A strong case can be made that Labour’s willingness to “think the unthinkable” made it possible for National to give up thinking altogether. Initially confounded by Labour’s abrupt change of ideological direction – not to mention the near universal praise heaped upon its new “more market” policies by the mainstream news media – National floundered hopelessly. Its win in 1990, which the news media proclaimed a “landslide”, was, by MMP standards, a remarkably close contest. National may have received 47.82 percent of the popular vote, but the combined popular vote for Labour, New Labour and the Greens was 47.15 percent.

Thanks to the First-Past-the-Post electoral system, the new National prime minister, Jim Bolger, was spared the challenge of governing with a one-seat majority. He may have campaigned in the poetry of “The Decent Society”, but the prose he governed in was all written by the same neoliberal scribes who had authored Labour’s policies – albeit with considerably sharper pens. The National Party’s finance minister’s, Ruth Richardson’s, “Mother of All Budgets”, so loudly condemned by Grant Robertson in Thursday’s Budget Speech, was really only Roger Douglas – with bells on.

By the time Labour (with the Alliance in tow) was back in control of the Treasury Benches, its acceptance of the ground rules of Neoliberalism was, if not complete, then sufficiently substantial for the emergence of a style of governance that could be, as John Key went on to prove, as readily adopted by National as Labour. Conservative purists railed against Key’s “Labour-Lite” approach, but it proved more than equal to the challenge of a global financial crisis and a devastating earthquake. It was certainly enough to secure nine years of National Government, which might easily, in the absence of “Jacindamania”, have stretched into twelve.

Historically, this is par for the course with National. From the Opposition Benches, it railed against the Keynesianism of the First Labour Government, only to embrace it as the price of electoral victory.

Muldoon shot down radical Sutchism in 1961, only to see Holyoake and Marshall adopt a watered-down version of the same well into the 1970s. In 1979, beggared for options in the face of seemingly indefatigable “stagflation”, Muldoon became the last, and easily the most radical, of the Sutchists.

Bolger played the same game with Neoliberalism: railing against its brutalities from Opposition; then allowing Bill Birch to crush the trade unions, and Richardson to poleaxe what was left of the welfare state, from the safety of the Government benches.

In 2008, Key accepted a less-sharp-edged version of Neoliberalism from Helen Clark, and cruised effortlessly to three electoral victories in a row.

And now, thanks to Covid-19, Labour finds itself, once again, strategically placed to set a new course for economic and social policy in New Zealand. With the monetarist policies that have, for the past 40 years, constituted the core of Neoliberalism, discredited (by that inveterate foe of all theories – Reality) Prime Minister Ardern and Finance Minister Robertson find themselves at a turning-point very similar to the one their party encountered in the early-1980s.

Confronted with the immediate challenges of a global pandemic, and, behind them, the even more daunting challenges of climate change, governments all over the world are shrugging-off the dogma that there is no problem so great that it cannot be solved by giving the market its head. State action, on a massive scale, is once again being seen, by politicians with an eye to the future, as the indispensable agency of economic and social survival.

Ardern and Robertson have grasped this ideological shift a great deal faster than any of their rivals. Certainly, it has encouraged them to deploy the sort of rhetoric that would have made their predecessors cringe. Targeting Richardson’s Mother of All Budgets and raising benefits in a long-delayed one-fingered salute to this hated left-wing symbol of neoliberal cruelty, was only the beginning. As the Budget Debate wore on, Labour’s backbenchers could not forbear from getting in on the act. The new MP for Wairarapa, Kieran McAnulty, delivered the lines most likely to raise the National Party’s collective blood-pressure:

“Yes, I am a socialist and I’m proud of it. Yeah, there you go. Thank you very much. Bring it on. And I’m very proud to say to the good people of the Wairarapa that they elected a proud socialist as their MP.”

The only real questions, after Thursday’s Budget, is how long will it take National to realise how profoundly the political game has been – and is being – transformed by Covid and Climate Change? Will it be two, three, or four terms? And, how many leaders will the party have to elect, and discard, before it finally masters the new language of electoral victory?

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website of Monday, 24 May 2021.