What’s on the Label -vs- What’s in the Tin.

Would our political parties pass muster under the Fair Trading Act?

WHAT IF OUR POLITICAL PARTIES were subject to the Fair Trading Act? What if they, like the nation’s businesses, were prohibited from misleading their consumers – i.e. the voters – about the nature, characteristics, suitability, or quantity of the products – i.e. the policies – on offer? Would they pass muster? Or would MBIE be sending them a letter?

Let’s begin with the smaller parties.

The unlikelihood of ever finding themselves in a position to implement their entire policy agenda significantly reduces the political incentives for small parties to obfuscate and mislead the voters.

Such honesty is both refreshing and alarming. Small parties like Te Pāti Māori, NZ First, Act, and the Greens are not, as a rule, reticent about their plans for the country. They rightly intuit that ideological candour attracts more serious interest than political evasiveness. Their preference is for the narrow temple over the broad church.

So, Te Pāti Māori is openly demanding tino rangatiratanga – Māori sovereignty – and to hell with all the cavilling colonialists who complain. The party’s openly stated mission is to win all seven of the Māori seats, and to eliminate Labour’s decisive advantage, vis-à-vis Te Pāti Māori, in the Party Vote. Its leaders neither expect, nor are they seeking, a majority of all the votes cast. Their plan is to win enough parliamentary seats to make the support of Te Pāti Māori indispensable to the formation of any future New Zealand government.

That this makes the party hell-scary to a very large number of Non-Māori voters doesn’t bother Te Pāti Māori. It is well aware that skewering the Pakeha is a winning feature, not a fatal bug, of the party’s pitch. To succeed electorally it needs the enthusiastic support of rangatahi – and half-measures are repugnant to the young. Inspired by the uncompromising militancy of Hana-Rāwhiti Maipi-Clarke, they want it all, and they want it now.

In other words, Te Pāti Māori is offering exactly what it says on the tin.

NZ First and its leader, Winston Peters, are considerably more opaque.

Schooled by Rob Muldoon – New Zealand’s second-most-successful populist politician after Richard Seddon – Peters’ consistent electoral objective has been to reconstitute the angry coalition of farmers, small-business owners, and culturally-alienated working-class voters, that swept Muldoon to victory in 1975.

Like Muldoon, Peters expects his angry coalition to shoulder the task of restoring the social, economic and cultural equilibrium which he charges the Left with disrupting. Unlike Muldoon, however, Peters had to launch his populist crusades in a multi-party environment. The binary choice between himself and Bill Rowling, which Muldoon set before voters in 1975, has never been available to Peters and NZ First. In the post-MMP political marketplace, NZ First has always faced too many competitors.

In attempting to match the offers of its competitors, NZ First has tended to promise more on the tin than its serially monogamous attachments to one or other of the two main parties could possibly secure by way of coalition agreements. It’s the party’s fatal marketing flaw: promising more, delivering less.

Act has never been overly concerned about what gets printed on the party’s tin, or whether it matches its contents. Hardly surprising, given that Act’s key objective has always been to preserve and, if possible, extend, the top-down free-market revolution.

Act’s most successful leaders, Richard Prebble and David Seymour, have always understood that the best way to achieve the party’s objectives is to persuade National voters that the dominant party of the Right has gone soft on social and cultural issues (free speech, the Treaty of Waitangi, law and order) or, even worse, that it is losing focus on the key objectives of neoliberal economics.

‘Give us the votes, and we will keep National honest’, has always been Act’s best pitch. And, if right-wing voters read no further than that on the tin, then satisfaction with the product is likely to be high. To paraphrase the Rolling Stones: Act doesn’t always get what disgruntled right-wing voters want (Treaty Principles Bill) but it’s highly effective at getting what the Neoliberal Revolution needs (workplace reform).

And then there’s the Greens.

For post-scarcity parties like the Values Party (1972-89) and the Greens, it really isn’t stretching things too far to suggest that what’s written on the tin matters a whole lot more than what’s inside it. The purpose of such parties (or should that be “movements”) is to educate and inspire the electorate. Meaning that it’s not so much a matter of telling people what’s actually in your tin, as it is of stipulating what should be in everybody else’s.

To a large extent this explains why Green Party co-leader James Shaw became something of an embarrassment to his colleagues. He’d committed the unforgivable sin of actually achieving something by persuading the National Party to lend its support to his Climate Change Response (Zero Carbon) Amendment Bill. Shaw’s wheeling and dealing, his willingness to compromise, smacked uncomfortably of actually existing politics – as opposed to the “perfect world” politics favoured by the true believers.

The Greens’ unbridled idealism explains in large measure why the challenge of matching what’s written on the party’s tin with its actual contents, has become so daunting. Promising the voters diversity, equity and inclusion on the label is one thing; opening the can to reveal Bible Belt Bussy; is something else entirely!

And Labour? Does it comport with the expectations of the Fair Trading Act?

It’s tempting to say that it does. (Not least on account of the fact that the author once sat as the party’s industrial representative on Labour’s New Zealand Council.) Certainly, anyone turning up to a Labour Party conference will still encounter trade union affiliates, feminists, LGBTQI activists, Māori reps, and ambitious youth delegates. Policy remits will be debated. Elections held. The trappings of a progressive party dedicated to furthering the interests of the New Zealand working-class are all still in place.

Upon closer inspection, however, the label on Labour’s tin has the look of something carefully designed by an advertising agency to evoke a powerful nostalgic reaction. There’s a lovely photo of Mickey Savage, the typeface chosen has a staunch 1930s feel to it, and there are numerous references to Labour’s proud history of delivering “social justice” to “working people”.

But the compulsory list of ingredients, set in 8 point at the bottom of the label, reveals something a little different: Democratic Socialism: 1 percent; Social Justice: 10 percent; Decolonisation and Indigenisation: 15 percent; Gender Equity: 19 percent; Neoliberalism: 55 percent.

Don’t say you weren’t warned.

And National – New Zealand’s most successful political party? How closely does National’s content match its branding?

Let’s start with the party’s name, “National”. It was deliberately chosen by the party’s founders to indicate that, unlike Labour’s openly sectional commitment to working-class New Zealanders and their trade unions, the new party (born in 1936 out of the United and Reform parties) was committed to serving the whole nation – irrespective of its citizens’ class origins. That was a big, and an almost impossible, ask.

If they’d been serious: if the party had indeed been dedicated to the welfare and advancement of all New Zealanders; i.e. to the “national” interest; then its policies would have built upon and extended Labour’s reforms. Not to put too fine a point upon it, a genuinely “national” party would have been as much “left” as it was “right”.

There will be many who, reading the above sentences, will cry: “Aha! That’s exactly what National is – ‘Labour Lite’!”

But, that would be an ideological, not an historical, response. Between 1936 and 1946 National was pledged to sweep away all of the social and industrial reforms of the First Labour Government. And even the party’s reluctant (albeit election-winning) acceptance of the welfare state in 1949 was tactical, rather than sincere. Forty-two years later, in 1991, National atoned for its earlier historical sins by laying waste to both the unions and the welfare state. What little of them remained standing, the party has been systematically dismantling ever since.

So, National isn’t a national party. Still less is it a nationalist party. A party infused with nationalist pride would be voluble in upholding the achievements of the New Zealand nation. It would sing the praises of its settlers, its city-builders, its progressive legislators, its engineers and scientists, its writers, poets, painters, and architects. A nationalist party would not sit mute as the New Zealand people’s achievements were disparaged as work of colonialist white supremacists.

No, National isn’t a nationalist party either.

If the policies promoted by the dominant party of the present coalition government came in a tin, and that tin was labelled “National”, then the only defence against a charge brought under the Fair Trading Act would be that after nearly 90 years of “representing everyone, farmers and businessmen alike” (thanks Gary McCormick) New Zealanders have come to accept that, in their country, the Right’s leading political party has only ever been notionally “national”.

We all know exactly what’s inside.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 21 April 2025.

Leadership Problems.

Contenders: The next question after “Will Luxon really go?” is, of course, “Will that work?” The answer to that question lies not so much in the efficacy of Luxon’s successor as it does in the perceived strength of the Centre-Left alternative.

AT LEAST TWO prominent political commentators are alluding publicly to the imminence of a leadership spill in the National Party. Matthew Hooton and Duncan Garner have both written recently about the National Party’s growing dissatisfaction with Prime Minister Christopher Luxon’s performance. This sort of commentary would be much easier for conservatives to dismiss were it coming from the usual left-wing suspects, but neither Hooton nor Garner fall into that category. If the Centre (let alone the Right) cannot hold, then things are most certainly falling apart.

The next question after “Will Luxon really go?” is, of course, “Will that work?” The answer to that question lies not so much in the efficacy of Luxon’s successor as it does in the perceived strength of the Centre-Left alternative.

Chris Hipkins is pulling out all the stops to convince New Zealanders that Labour can indeed assemble a more effective and efficient coalition government than the fractious assemblage currently running the country. He used the occasion of his (rather belated) State of the Nation address to the Auckland Chamber of Commerce on Friday (7/3/25) to reassure the business community that his party is committed to comporting itself in a thoroughly non-threatening fashion.

As proof of these moderate intentions, Hipkins later announced a reshuffled, ‘all the talents’, shadow-cabinet – presumably committed to rolling out equally non-threatening policies. It is many years since horses crowded the nation’s streets, but even if they were still there, we may be certain that Labour has nothing planned that would frighten them even a little.

Does that mean that Labour has abandoned all thought of raising taxes, or, even worse, imposing that perennial horse-frightener – a Capital Gains Tax (CGT)? Not at all. It simply means that, in marked contrast to earlier Labour leaders, Hipkins intends to make the case for Labour’s revenue-enhancing policies well before the formal campaign launches in September/October 2026.

In this regard, Labour will be able to draw on the widespread global support for CGTs. New Zealand remains an outlier among the members of the OECD for the disinclination of its political leadership – Left as well as Right – to introduce a comprehensive tax on capital gains. Beset by the same demographic pressures as the rest of the developed world, the New Zealand state remains unusually reliant on income and sales taxes to pay for its core services. As the cost of these services, health in particular, continues to grow, the ability of the state to pay for them, without increasing its revenue, must be called into question.

Finance Minister Nicola Willis’s willingness to meet her government’s core obligations by incurring more and more debt will, as her Treasury advisers were quick to point out, very rapidly become economically unsustainable. But diluting those obligations, by reducing or privatising core public services will, even more rapidly, become politically unsustainable.

The present government’s economic and political difficulties are attributable almost entirely to its unfathomable decision to slash billions off the state’s income by cutting taxes when virtually every part of the state apparatus was crying out for more, and just about every responsible economist was arguing against it. Attempting to resolve the inevitable (and self-imposed) fiscal crisis by cutting state expenditure, has only compounded the Coalition’s difficulties.

On its face the Coalition’s behaviour seems self-defeating, which is why left-leaning commentator Rob Campbell’s latest contribution to The Post is so intriguing. In brief, Campbell sees a great deal more method than madness in the Coalition’s behaviour.

Stripping away its pious posturings and well-worn excuses, the former trade union leader reveals what he considers to be five key shifts at the heart of the Coalition’s policies:

• From public to private investment and delivery.
• From an emergent bi-cultural, back to a colonial nation.
• From universal to user charges.
• From regulated to market-use of resources.
• From limits on, to incentives for, private investment returns.

The temptation for Hipkins and his colleagues to pledge themselves to rolling-back the Coalition’s right-wing policy transitions will be strong. If they succumb, it would require an incoming centre-left government to reprioritise:

• Public provision over private enterprise.
• Tino rangatiratanga over colonial institutions.
• Universal provision over user pays.
• Rational regulation over laissez-faire.
• The public good over private interest.

This isn’t quite the pitch Hipkins made to the Auckland Chamber of Commerce. His purpose there was to play up the continuities embedded in National and Labour policy – especially with regard to the restoration of New Zealand’s decrepit infrastructure. Picking up on the growing disquiet at the Coalition’s apparent obsession with tearing down everything Labour had built, Hipkins was also careful to reassure his audience that while Labour might amend the policies of its predecessor, it does not share its affinity for the wrecking-ball.

The name for this approach is the “small-target strategy”. The idea being that the less one’s opponents have to aim at, the less they can hit. Sir Keir Starmer’s emphatic 2024 victory over the British Conservatives represented a huge vindication of the strategy, which might also be described as relying upon your opponent’s failures, rather than your own party’s policies, to carry you into office. Or, as Napoleon expressed the same idea: “Never interrupt your enemy when he’s making a mistake.” Bold and detailed policies are a dangerous distraction.

In the context of MMP, however, one’s own party’s commendable policy discipline can easily be compromised by the wild policy incontinence of one’s putative coalition partners. A strong and measured argument in favour of introducing a CGT on the part of Labour could all-too-easily be undermined by the Greens trumpeting a swingeing Wealth Tax on the non-tax-paying rich. And even that degree of fiscal radicalism might be overwhelmed by Te Pāti Māori demanding that full compensation for the crimes of colonisation be paid to tangata whenua.

Small wonder, then, that Hipkins is asking all those New Zealanders anxious to be rid of the National-Act-NZ First Coalition to play it safe by making sure that Labour receives by far the largest share of the anti-government Party Vote. Keeping the parliamentary representation of Labour’s potential coalition partners as small as possible will also limit dramatically their ability to demand excessive and/or outlandish policy concessions.

A Green Party heading into the election with 15 percent of the vote is much more likely to make trouble for Labour than a Green Party hovering just above the 5 percent threshold. A Te Pāti Māori facing stiff competition from Labour in all the Māori seats, and registering insufficient voter support to crest the MMP threshold, will find it harder to justify the angry performative politics at which it excels.

The chances of Labour winning back all those voters who deserted it for the Right in 2023 would, of course, be seriously enhanced if Hipkins felt confident enough in his position to execute what might be called a “Newsom Turn”.

Gavin Newsom, the Democratic Governor of California, last week turned his face against his party’s uncompromising support for transgenderism. By coming out against biological males participating in sports formerly restricted to biological females, Newsom signalled that he would run for President in 2028 on a “non-woke” policy platform. His decision is the strongest signal yet that the Democratic National Committee’s hold on the party’s ideological direction is faltering.

A similar signal from Hipkins, indicating that Labour’s infatuation with Identity Politics was also waning, would hasten the return of the tens-of-thousands of supporters alienated by Labour’s 2020-23 policies. The true test of Hipkins’ leadership, however, would be whether or not he could prevent tens-of-thousands of outraged “progressives” responding to his “Newsom Turn” by deserting Labour for the Greens and Te Pāti Māori.

Clearly, Christopher Luxon is not the only politician with leadership problems.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 10 March 2025.

By Any Other Name.

The Natural Choice: As a starter for ten percent of the Party Vote, “saving the planet” is a very respectable objective. Young voters, in particular, raised on the dire (if unheeded) warnings of climate scientists, and the irrefutable evidence of devastating weather events linked to global warming, vote Green. After all, what sort of person votes against a liveable future?

THE GREENS remain a persistent political puzzle. In spite of espousing ideas and promoting policies that would keep any other party well below the five percent MMP threshold, recent polling places the party between 12 and 14 percent. If replicated in a real election, that level of support would earn the Greens 16-18 seats, making them an indispensable player in any putative government of the Left.

Clearly, the Green brand is doing almost all of the party’s heavy political lifting. What New Zealand’s own Green Party is actually committed to achieving matters much less than what Green parties, as generally understood by the world’s voters, are assumed to be committed to achieving – the salvation of the planet.

As a starter for ten percent of the Party Vote, “saving the planet” is a very respectable objective. Young voters, in particular, raised on the dire (if unheeded) warnings of climate scientists, and the irrefutable evidence of devastating weather events linked to global warming, vote Green. After all, what sort of person votes against a liveable future?

Young voters are not, however, the Greens only source of electoral support. They can also rely upon a substantial number of older voters to tick the Greens’ box on the ballot paper. Some of these will be unreconstructed hippies, the New Zealanders who cut their political teeth on the Values Party back in the early-1970s, and who then fell into the Greens’ welcoming arms with huge relief in 1990, following six years of the apostate Labour Party’s “Rogernomics”.

No one grasped the power of the Green brand more firmly than Jim Anderton, whose uneasy coalition of free-market-unfriendly parties, the Alliance, would not have been electorally viable without the Greens’ participation, and did not long survive their departure. As a centre-left politician determined to bring Labour back to its social-democratic senses, Anderton was determined to provide the many thousands of disillusioned former-Labour-voters with a progressive alternative that was guaranteed to win seats and, thereby, to wield at least some measure of determinative power over policy.

The Alliance’s demise, in 2002, left only the Greens to supply this critical support to the Labour Party. Precisely how many Green voters were voting for the global Green movement’s core principles: Ecological Wisdom, Social Justice, Grassroots Democracy and Nonviolence; and how many were voting for the Greens to keep Labour honest; is difficult to calculate. Suffice to say, when Labour does well the Green vote tends to fall, only recovering when voter support for its progressive competitor declines.

Since breaking free of the Alliance in 1999 the Greens have never failed to crest the 5 percent MMP threshold. (Although, they have come perilously close to falling below it on a number of occasions.) A reasonable working assumption would be that; in a good election for the Greens the ratio of strategic left-wing voters to ideologically-committed Greens will be roughly 50/50; and, in a bad election, that ratio will skew sharply in favour of the true-believers.

What the Greens’ true-believers believe, however, has changed.

Like the Values Party which preceded it, the Green Party that entered Parliament in 1999, under the co-leadership of Jeanette Fitzsimons and Rod Donald, took pride in affirming its allegiance to empirical science. In conformity with the political practice of Green parties around the world, the New Zealand party drew a sharp distinction between the bought-and-paid-for “science” of the big corporations, and the findings of hero scientists who presented their findings to the world fearlessly and without regard to how many corporate toes were trampled on in the process.

This science-driven Green Party reached its apogee under Rod Donald’s successor, Russel Norman – now the Executive-Director of Greenpeace Aotearoa. Working alongside freshwater ecologist Dr Mike Joy – the very epitome of a fearless hero-scientist – Norman and the Greens waged an unrelenting war against “dirty dairying” and the pollution of New Zealand’s waterways.

The success of this environmentally-focused Green Party was reflected in the 11.06 percent share of the Party Vote it received, along with 14 parliamentary seats, in the 2011 General Election. (In the 2023 General Election the Greens received 11.60 percent of the Party Vote and 15 seats.)

More than a decade has passed since the Greens campaigned as an unequivocally environmentalist party. Along with virtually every other element of the New Zealand Left, the Greens have embraced what their conservative opponents delight in castigating as the politics of “wokeness”.

In less pejorative terms, the Greens’ re-orientation involves the forefronting of issues that, while always present in the party’s policy mix, were hitherto given less emphasis. The Greens’ straightforward recognition and celebration of te Tiriti o Waitangi, for example, is now couched in the uncompromising vocabulary of decolonisation and indigenisation. Simple support for trans-gender New Zealanders has morphed into the aggressive assertion and enforcement of radical trans-gender ideology. Any external and/or internal criticism of these developments is condemned by the party as “hate speech”. Freedom of expression is no longer an unchallengeable aspect of “grassroots democracy”, or, as the New Zealand Greens have re-named it, “appropriate decision-making”.

A sense of this change of tone in the Greens is readily apparent in the most recent Green Party policy document. Ostensibly a presentation of the party’s latest thinking on how best to reduce greenhouse emissions, He Ara Anamata, contains a great deal more than the promptings of environmental science.

“For generations,” writes Green Co-leader Chloe Swarbrick in her introduction, “extractive systems have treated the natural world as a resource to exploit, without regard for its limits or the intricate relationships that sustain life.”

Similar sentiments were expressed 25 years ago. It is, however, doubtful whether Swarbrick’s subsidiary claims would have been advanced so forcefully:

“Colonisation has done the same to people and cultures. It has severed connections between tangata whenua and their whenua, prioritising profit over protection, and imposing systems that strip away self-determination and reciprocity. The impacts of this legacy persist, deepening inequalities and undermining resilience.”

Certainly, the expression of unabashed hostility towards capitalism is a more recent rhetorical trend:

“These inequalities have their deep roots in violent land and resource theft of iwi Māori. Capitalism – this current insatiable, unsustainable economic system – requires colonisation and the constant assimilation of new frontiers to exploit and extract from.”

That the above is not simply the ideology of the Greens’ firebrand leader is made clear in the body of the policy document. Te Tiriti’s role in reducing greenhouse emissions will, if the Greens have their way, involve: “An equitable transition, developed by Māori and the Crown [which] will actively prioritise te iwi Māori and the Māori economy.”

Would any other political party (apart from Te Pāti Māori) that so openly attacked capitalism, promised to advance the interests of indigenous citizens ahead of later arrivals, and announced its intention to advance the entire population, whether it likes it or not, towards “[a]n economy based on climate justice [with] policies that are underpinned by Te Tiriti, [and supported by] circular systems, renewable energies, and just transitions for workers” be given such a free pass?

Another expression which encompasses the notion of “circular systems” is “autarky”. That history records a strong association between authoritarian regimes and autarky is probably worth remembering. So, too, the enormous difference between “just transitions” arranged for workers, and the securing of economic and social justice by workers.

But that’s the great advantage of having a brand as immune to critical examination as that of the Greens. Try calling anti-capitalism, ethno-nationalism, statist imposition of societal priorities, and a barely disguised disdain for the principles of democracy, by any other name – and see if it smells as sweet.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 9 December 2024.

Handling Democracy.

String-Pulling in the Dark: For the democratic process to be meaningful it must also be public. 

WITH TRUST AND CONFIDENCE in New Zealand’s politicians and journalists steadily declining, restoring those virtues poses a daunting challenge. Just how daunting is made clear by comparing the way politicians and journalists treated New Zealanders fifty years ago with the way they handle them today.

The use of the word “handle” is deliberate. The way people are treated cannot be separated, conceptually, from the idea of accountability. Treat people well, and approbation generally follows; treat them badly, and condemnation is to be expected. Likewise, the idea of “handling” people cannot escape its negative associations with manipulation and cynicism. Nobody likes being “handled”.

How, then, were New Zealanders treated by their politicians and journalists in 1974? Given that the weekend just passed featured the Annual Conference of the New Zealand Labour Party (what? really? you didn’t notice?) perhaps the best place to start is with the way these events were covered fifty years ago.

Though younger New Zealanders will struggle to credit this, the annual conferences of the major parties were deemed sufficiently important for the state-owned television network to not only make them lead item on the nightly news bulletins, but also to produce special conference programmes for broadcast later in the evening. Over three consecutive nights, interested citizens could watch between 15-20 minutes of conference coverage – roughly an hour in total – from which to gauge the temper and condition of the political parties aspiring to govern them.

The nation’s newspapers were no less seized of the importance of reporting the major parties’ annual conferences thoroughly. Detailed coverage of major policy debates, including lengthy quotes from MPs’ and conference delegates’ speeches, was expected. And, since the job of covering politics fell to a small clutch of senior, highly-experienced journalists, their analysis of events, on and off the conference floor, was eagerly anticipated and consumed by interested readers.

Even 40 years ago, it still made sense for Labour Leader David Lange to quip that as PM he was required to satisfy the “Three Dicks” – The Dominion’s Richard Long, TVNZ’s Richard Harman, and Radio New Zealand’s Richard Griffin.

It is sobering to recall the respect accorded to the democratic ideal by the politicians and journalists of that now distant era. The idea of keeping the news media away from all but the most carefully stage-managed, set-piece, events – like the Leader’s speech – would have struck the politicians of that era as outrageous.

It was a simple matter of quid-pro-quo. If political parties expected to govern the country, then they were morally obliged to invite the country to observe and judge their deliberations. If that entailed party conference delegates revealing sharp divisions over the wisdom of a particular policy, then, so-be-it. That’s what politics is about.

Such close coverage had another side-effect. It allowed the public to catch its first glimpse of up-and-coming political talent. A delegate capable of delivering a memorable line, or telling a genuinely funny political joke, was someone who would be talked about the next day by thousands of his or her fellow Kiwis. They instantly became somebody party bosses and journalists, alike, needed to keep an eye on.

On all sides, fifty years ago, there was respect. Respect for the people who cared enough to participate in mass political organisations. Respect for the journalists who bore witness to the cut-and-thrust of real political debates. Respect for the entire democratic process which, to be meaningful also has to be public.

The contrast with the coverage of Labour’s 2024 annual conference could hardly be more stark. A minute or two of coverage on the six o’clock news bulletin was all the citizens of New Zealand were deemed fit to bear. Inevitably, everything was about the party leader, Chris Hipkins. How could it not be? The media were not encouraged to cover anybody other than “Chippie” and his allies.

Predictably, the key debate of the Conference, over tax policy, was held behind closed doors. No chance, then, for the public to gain some understanding of the mood of the party’s rank-and-file members. No chance of hearing an arresting flourish of rhetoric, or the sort of wit that bears repeating to friends and colleagues the following day. No chance, indeed, of encountering anything that hasn’t been pre-approved by the comms team well ahead of time.

Not that the comms team got everything right. Chippie’s Friday-night welcome to delegates included the line: “[I]n the true tradition of the Labour movement, we come together one year on not to mourn, but to organise.”

Now, any student of labour history will recognise that reference. The last words of the militant American trade union organiser and balladeer, Joe Hill, convicted on a trumped-up murder charge and executed in 1915 by a Utah firing squad, were: “Don’t mourn – organise!”

The risk, of course, was that anybody who recognised Joe Hill’s last words might take strong exception to Chris Hipkins comparing Labour’s well-deserved thrashing in the 2023 General Election, with the US copper bosses’ judicial murder of the Industrial Workers of the World’s (also known as the “Wobblies”) most beloved activist. Not that the risk was very high. Say “Wobbly” to the average Labour staffer of 2024 and they’ll assume you’re referring to jelly – or the Labour caucus.

Oh, for the days when there were political editors who understood what they were hearing, and recognised what they were looking at.

Willie Jackson’s co-starring role at this year’s Labour conference, for example, was decidedly odd. With a third of Labour’s voters supporting David Seymour’s Treaty Principles Bill, bringing out the legislation’s most truculent opponent should probably have struck at least some in the Press Gallery as an uncharacteristically bold move on the part of Labour’s apparatchiks.

Then again, Hipkins’ political survival resting squarely on the shoulders of Jackson and his Māori Caucus may be old news to the Press Gallery. Such a shame they have yet to share this crucial piece of political intelligence with the rest of us. It does, however, explain why Labour’s leadership has chosen te Tiriti as the hill upon which the party is ready to die – a second time.

Never mind, the comms team had carefully pre-tested a handful of bright shiny promises to distract the punters: Dunedin Hospital Rebuild Reaffirmed. Inter-Island Ferries Replaced as Planned. Labour will say ‘No’ to AUKUS. Got to make this “Coalition of Chaos” a one-term government!

It is here that the most important difference between 2024 and 1974 becomes clear. Fifty years ago, keeping democracy healthy was the No. 1 priority of politicians and journalists. Both knew the importance of allowing the public to observe what was happening in the nation’s most important political parties. How could voters deliver a credible electoral judgement if the doors were shut in the faces of their proxies – and the news media accepted such exclusion as fair and reasonable?

It is only when the democratic process is perceived by both politicians and journalists as a “deplorable” obstacle to the safe delivery of the political, social, economic and cultural outcomes they jointly favour, that treating their fellow citizens like mushrooms is considered acceptable. Only then does the need to “handle” New Zealanders become obvious.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 2 December 2024.

No Enemies To The Left – Or The Right.

Wrong Turn: Labour and National can only reduce the toxic influence of their electoral competitors by rejecting their extremism.

“NO ENEMIES TO THE LEFT” has always been Labour’s rule-of-thumb. What, after all, does a moderate, left-of-centre party gain by allowing its electoral rivals to become repositories for every radical (i.e. congenitally dissatisfied) left-winger’s protest vote? To deliver effective government, a major party needs coalition partners that are weak and electorally vulnerable. Strong and electorally-secure coalition partners, as Christopher Luxon is discovering, tend to make effective government … problematic.

The classical solution to this problem requires the major parties of the Left and the Right to construct their policy platforms in such a way that only the most unrelenting ideologues would feel impelled to vote for their electoral confreres. By offering enough of what are generally perceived to be “sensible” right-wing/left-wing policies, they make it unnecessary for all but a handful of voters to venture any further along the political spectrum.

When the major parties adopt policies which a large number of their traditional supporters regard as uncharacteristic or extreme, an opportunity is created – especially under proportional representation – for those who feel deserted and/or betrayed by such behaviour to be offered a new electoral home. Labour’s embrace of “Rogernomics” forced it to entertain the Alliance and the Greens; National’s surrender to Ruth Richardson and Jenny Shipley created the opening for Winston Peters and NZ First.

The great risk for the major parties, should these “off-shoots” acquire a solid electoral foothold, is that major party strategists come to regard them as more-or-less reliable allies, rather than what they truly are – dangerous competitors. This could not be said of either Labour’s Helen Clark, or National’s John Key. When Clark was presented with the opportunity to kill the Alliance, she did not hesitate. When Peters and NZ First made themselves equally vulnerable to electoral destruction, Key dispatched them to the outer electoral darkness.

Labour either would not, or could not, replicate Key’s ruthlessness with the Greens. To date, the Green “brand” has proved sufficiently robust to withstand Labour’s “friendly fire”. Indeed, there seems to be a general reluctance on Labour’s part to treat the Greens as a serious rival. At the electorate level one occasionally hears angry accusations that the Greens are “stealing Labour’s vote” (which in Auckland Central, Wellington Central and Rongotai turned out to be no more than the truth!) but the idea of an all-out assault on the Greens has so far been dismissed by Labour’s leadership as electorally counter-productive.

From a more distant perspective, however, Labour’s tolerance of the Greens appears particularly foolish. The cultural radicalism that has largely superimposed itself over the Greens’ hitherto electorally unassailable “environmental-saviour” profile has been bleeding into Labour’s ranks for several years.

Nowhere was this more dramatically on display than in Nanaia Mahuta’s behind-the-scenes collaboration with the Greens during the “Three Waters” parliamentary debate. With Labour’s Māori Caucus acting as the surgeon, the Greens and Labour have been joined at the hip on virtually all matters relating to te Tiriti.

A similar convergence long ago became evident on transgender issues. For the best part of a week in March 2023, Labour and the Greens outbid each other in their condemnation of gender-critical provocateur, Posie Parker. As a consequence, both parties were strongly criticised for jointly contributing to the violence that accompanied Parker’s visit.

That Chris Hipkins’, upon becoming prime-minister in January 2023, either would not, or could not, add his party’s “woke” positions to Labour’s “policy bonfire” did not go unnoticed by the electorate.

Similarly, National’s low-key response to the Free Speech issue, coupled with its refusal to speak out more forcefully against “decolonisation” and “indigenisation” – policies being pursued, with Green support, by what struck many as an unheeding and ideologically-driven Labour Government – both rebounded strongly to the advantage of Act and NZ First. For a party seeking to make itself, once again, the big tent under which the overwhelming majority of right-of-centre voters could congregate, National’s weak responses were politically perplexing and electorally damaging.

Certainly, had Luxon’s 2023 share of the Party Vote (38 percent) equalled Bill English’s in 2017(44 percent) then his Coalition Agreement with Act and NZ First would have been a very different document.

It is the Labour Party, however, that has most need of an unwavering “no enemies to the left” strategy going into the 2026 general election. To understand the dangers it will face if it does not do everything it can to drive down the Greens’ support, Hipkins, or whoever replaces him, has only to consider the left-wing political debacle that is Wellington.

By 2023, Labour’s relationship with the Greens in Wellington had reached the point where voters no longer considered which of the two “left-wing” parties they supported to be all that important. As natural coalition partners, with broadly similar policies, a vote for Labour or the Greens could be presented, simply, as a vote “for the Left”. Coke, or Pepsi? It was purely a matter of taste.

Some indication of just how seriously this approach can go astray has been on more-or-less constant display since Tory Whanau was elected Mayor of Wellington, alongside a council dominated by “the Left”. The result has been a hot mess, as unedifying as it has been ineffectually extravagant.

If left-wing politicians believe that on the big issues they are as one, then they will start sweating the small issues. Inevitably, these small issues reveal themselves to be the big issues, helpfully reduced by unelected bureaucrats to bite-sized chunks. The resulting division, bitterness, and recrimination benefits nobody but the Right.

In what may yet turn out to be the decisive battle, Labour finally did the right thing. It stood by its policy of opposing asset sales. In doing so, however, its representatives incurred the wrath of their ultra-left “comrades”. These latter construed the vote to retain the Council’s airport shares as a repudiation of the Treaty rights of Wellington’s mana whenua, or, at least, of their unelected representatives.

The American political philosopher, Susan Neiman, wrote a book called “Left Is Not Woke”. The recent behaviour of Wellington City Council offers a vivid illustration of her thesis.

If Labour refuses to re-make itself as a moderate left-leaning party, with policies corresponding to the wishes of the overwhelming majority of New Zealanders keen to see the back of the National-Act-NZ First Coalition Government, then it will remain in Opposition. While the voters are encouraged to see the Greens – and Te Pāti Māori – as Labour’s “natural” partners, espousing policies largely indistinguishable from its own, they will continue to hold their noses and vote for whichever right-wing party they consider the least objectionable.

Labour needs to reduce the toxic influence of the parties to its left by making it clear that it has put its own woke inclinations behind it. This will be a twofer for whoever has the guts to make it happen. Not only will it reduce (or even eliminate) the electoral irritants to the party’s left, but it will also, as an added bonus, neutralise the equally irritating woke faction cluttering-up its own ranks. Indeed, achieving the first objective is absolutely contingent upon achieving the second. 

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 14 October 2024.

Men, the Left, and the “Women’s Vote”.

On Calvary Street are trellises

Where bright as blood the roses bloom,
And gnomes like pagan fetishes
Hang their hats on an empty tomb
Where two old souls go slowly mad,
National Mum and Labour Dad.

James K. Baxter
Ballad of Calvary Street
1969

JAMES K. BAXTER’S stereotypes, “National Mum” and “Labour Dad”, strike a discordant note in the Twenty-First Century New Zealander’s ear. Most obviously because the political loyalties of men and women have, in the 55 years since Baxter wrote his poem, undergone a dramatic reversal. Labour supporters, today, are much more likely to be women, while National’s support-base has become disproportionately male. How is this dramatic shift in the political allegiances of the sexes to be explained?

The most important driver of the so-called “gender gap” has been the steady erosion of working-class power. Many factors have been at work in this process, but the most important is the slow demise of what was formerly the Left’s most important constitutive myth.

The move to drive women and children out of the paid workforce (which, in the early days of industrial capitalism, they had dominated) was seen (at least by men) as a moral and economic triumph. Not only were society’s most vulnerable members rescued from the ruthless exploitation of capitalist employers, but their return to the “safety” of the domestic sphere, by shrinking the pool of available industrial workers, allowed husbands, fathers and sons to drive-up wage-rates and reclaim the “breadwinner” role so central to the sustainability of patriarchy. Accordingly, setting the price of labour, and growing the political strength that flowed from working-class organisation, was seen as the work of men, by men, for men.

As anyone who has ever heard Judy Collins’ inspiring rendition of the song “Bread and Roses” will attest, the idea that the advance of the working-class was the work of men, alone, is nonsensical. In the clothing and textile industries especially women workers vastly outnumbered men, and their struggles for economic justice were waged no less fiercely than those of their “brothers”.

It nevertheless remains an historical fact that in the vast majority of factories, in the coal mines and the steel mills, in transportation and on the docks, it was overwhelmingly a man’s world. The left-wing project, although conceptually inseparable from the steady advance of working-class power under capitalism, was also presented as a cause in which the qualities and responsibilities of masculinity were constantly made manifest.

Culturally, project and cause came together in the artistic and literary figure of the working-class hero. With every economic and social advance, the pride of “working-men” grew. Their unions and their parties were hailed as the engines of the future, generating a muscular progressivism in which males placed themselves unfailingly at the heart of political action.

So much for “Labour Dad’s back-story. How was “National Mum” created?

Fundamentally, the National Party’s assiduous courting of the female voter is a reflection of the New Zealand Right’s desperation to break the Left’s easy domination of the electorate in the late-1930s and throughout the 1940s.

That the “women’s vote” might deviate significantly from that of the men’s was demonstrated with startling force in the British general election of 1931. At the behest of King George V, the British Labour leader, Ramsay Macdonald, joined forces with the Conservatives and the Liberal Party to form the “National Government” – a grand coalition to address the devastating impact of the Great Depression. Predictably, Macdonald’s “treachery” split the Labour Party and divided the working-class.

Appealing to the British people for what he called a “doctor’s mandate” to heal the country’s economic afflictions, Macdonald’s National Government secured the support of an astonishing 67 percent of the voting public. A huge number of these voters were young working-class women, participating electorally for only the second time since the franchise was finally given to all British women over the age of twenty-one in 1928.

That the offer of national unity, over class division, had proved irresistible to so large a chunk of the female electorate was enough to make even dyed-in-the-wool conservative politicians sit up and take notice. In 1931, to the utter consternation of their menfolk, women voters had proved to have minds of their own.

It was a lesson that the New Zealand National Party, formed in the year following Labour’s electoral triumph of 1935, could hardly fail to keep at the front of its mind. After all, it was women voters who had kept National out of power until it undertook to leave Labour’s welfare state intact, and who, weary of post-war controls and shortages, had seated National on the Treasury Benches for the first time in 1949.

Most of all, however, it was women voters who, like their British sisters twenty years earlier, had voted for national unity, over trade union militancy and class war, in the snap-election called by National to validate its handling of the bitter 1951 Waterfront Lockout. National’s share of the popular vote, at 54 percent, secured its most emphatic victory, ever.

Not all women were prepared to break ranks from their families’ deeply ingrained electoral preferences. Indeed, most women, like most men, voted the same way as their fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives. But, enough of them voted against the familial and marital grain to give National the electoral edge it had been seeking since Labour, with 55 percent of the popular vote, had so decisively shifted the political dial in 1938. Between 1949 and 1984, a period of 35 years, Labour would spend just six years in office.

That long period of National Party electoral dominance was aided by the slow decay and demoralisation of both the New Zealand trade union movement and the Labour Party. The heroic component of the movement, the cream of the nation’s working-class, had been comprehensively defeated and dispersed by the National Government in 1951.

Their defeat could not have been secured without the complicity of the Federation of Labour, whose leaders were happy to see the most radical (and democratic) unions, thorns in their sides for many years, humbled. Not that the “moderate unionists” – as National called them – were unaware of just how comprehensively they had been co-opted by the Right. Twenty years hence, John Lennon would argue that “a working-class hero is something to be”. These guys knew that they weren’t.

What’s more, the impression grew in the minds of at least some working-class men that at least some of the working-class women they rubbed shoulders with also knew that there wasn’t much of the hero left in them.

Increasingly, a crass economism, “bread and butter issues”, came to define the mission of both the trade unions and the Labour Party. Throughout the golden economic weather of the long post-war boom it was enough to keep the wolves of doubt from the door – even if the post-war prosperity, upon which the whole, delicate, socio-political compromise rested, was claimed – and acknowledged – as the National Party’s achievement. Upward social mobility, every aspiring working-class mum’s secret hope for her kids, had become the Right’s most potent promise. They were the heroes now.

Sullen, unadventurous, politically-conventional, and materialistic – that is what so many of New Zealand’s working-class men had become. Kiwis may have joked about being a nation devoted to “Rugby, Racing, and Beer”, but the view from where working-class women were now positioned offered little to laugh at. They chafed for change, for something better. If not for themselves, then for their sons and – why not? – their daughters, too.

In the 1970s and 80s those sons and daughters – especially the daughters – would re-energise and redefine the New Zealand Left. But, across the comfortable, but decidedly unheroic, 1950s and 60s, “National Mum” and “Labour Dad” would continue to cancel each other out … almost.

This essay was originally posted on The Democracy Project substack on Friday, 4 October 2024.

The Dead-End Options Of Political Decay.

Dark Times: Denied the state’s leadership and resources, New Zealand’s economy has been hollowed out and taken over. More importantly, so has its democracy.

WHAT’S WRONG WITH NATIONAL? New Zealand’s “natural party of government” (since its formation in 1936 the National Party has won 17 out of 28 general elections) has long been recognised as a moderate and pragmatic political force. Not only that, but when hardline individuals and factions have taken control of the party, it has demonstrated an admirable willingness to step away from its extremists and re-engage with the political mainstream. From Sid Holland to Keith Holyoake, Ruth Richardson to Bill English, Don Brash to John Key, National has never been slow to recognise an ideological losing streak – and do something about it.

What happened?

Given the party’s mainstream status, it should come as no surprise that what happened to National bears close comparison to what happened to Labour. By embracing the essentially anti-political objectives of the “more market” reforms of the late-1980s and early-1990s, both major parties gave away most of the New Zealand state’s hitherto extensive powers of economic intervention. In doing so they reduced significantly the role and purpose of New Zealand’s elected leadership. National and Labour politicians are still working out what that means, not only for themselves, but also for the parties they represent. 

New Zealand has always suffered from the disadvantages associated with a small population and the large distances separating the country from its principal markets. To offset these disadvantages, the New Zealand state was forced to play a central role in funding the sort of infrastructure which, in other countries, was paid for by the private sector. It’s not that New Zealand lacked capitalists, it’s just that the repeated failure of their undercapitalised private enterprises very swiftly reconciled them to the inescapable fact of their economic lives. That, when it came to laying down the building blocks of a working national economy: banks, insurance companies, railways, roads and bridges, schools and hospitals; the state was the only player with anything like deep enough pockets.

The economic necessity of state intervention catapulted New Zealand’s politicians into what can only be described as an heroic role. Where Great Britain had its Isambard Kingdom Brunel, New Zealand had Julius Vogel. Against the Empire’s Cecil Rhodes, New Zealand set its own Richard ‘King Dick’ Seddon.

The burgeoning wealth of the United States may have been created by its capitalist ‘bobber barons’, but the generally comfortable condition of most New Zealanders at the turn of the Nineteenth Century was the legacy of their hero politicians and their activist state. Not for nothing was this tiny country hailed as “the social laboratory of the world”.

As the Great Depression of the 1930s sent New Zealanders reeling economically, their political response was entirely consistent with the history of “God’s own country”. Almost instinctively, the victims of the worldwide economic catastrophe turned to the state – not only for short-term relief, but also for reassurance that, in the long term, they and their children would have a future worth living in. The First Labour Government’s success in meeting both of these expectations transformed its leader, Michael Joseph Savage, into something considerably more than a hero. It made him a saint.

A tough act to follow. Forced to watch the Left’s steady expansion of state power, and alarmed by the growing power of the compulsorily unionised working-class which, for 13 long years, had kept Labour in government and National cooling its heels on the Opposition Benches, Sid Holland became National’s first prime minister with one over-riding purpose: to make New Zealand safe for farmers and businessmen, and their wives, by turfing out the trade unionists and public servants who had somehow contrived to park their impertinent posteriors in the big leather chairs. Smashing the bolshie wharfies’ union and its allies certainly hastened this restoration of the ‘right people’, and their interests. National would never lose its aura as the country’s prime defender of law and order.

The 1951 Waterfront Dispute was not, however, the first step towards breaking the New Zealand state’s grip on the New Zealand economy. Subsidies and import licences survived the angry eight year reign of Sid Holland and his cronies. His successor, Keith Holyoake, tended the “stabilised”, state-guided, New Zealand economy with the same care that he tended his beloved roses. Unconvinced of the need for major change, “Kiwi Keith” stretched National’s political dominance over the entire 1960s with all the smug propriety of a pampered family cat.

This was the achievement that Rob Muldoon spent the whole nine years of his prime ministership attempting to replicate. Though presented to young New Zealanders as a cross between Darth Vader and Voldemort, National’s fourth prime minister’s boast that he was the last finance minister to truly understand the New Zealand economy was by no means a vain one.

One has only to survey his “Think Big” programme of state-sponsored growth, to see how thoroughly he had absorbed the central truth of New Zealand’s economic history. That, stripped of the state’s resources, the nation’s economy would, in short order, be hollowed out and taken over. More importantly, so would its democracy. New Zealand’s politicians would cease to be heroes, and become villains.

Mastering the complicated alchemy of turning villains into heroes pretty much describes the politics of the last 40 years. After burning down Labour’s inclusive economy with the ‘Rogernomics’ flame-thrower; after promising voters the ‘Decent Society’, and delivering the ‘Mother of All Budgets’; where were the politicians charged with protecting Neoliberalism’s low-tax, deregulated and privatised economy supposed to go? How can a party convince voters that it will do something, when it knows full well that, since 1984, New Zealand governments aren’t allowed to do anything?

The answer devised by Labour’s Helen Clark and Michael Cullen, and perfected by National’s John Key and Bill English, was to smile and wave and hope that their political careers came to an end before the nation’s infrastructure collapsed. Between them, National and Labour kept up this charade for 18 years. The obvious weakness of the strategy, that it would only work for as long as the infrastructure remained upright, left the next generation of Labour and National leaders facing something bearing a frightening resemblance to the Gotterdammerung.

Small wonder, then, that having been returned to the Opposition benches, first Labour’s and then National’s caucuses, went bonkers. Electing and/or ejecting a leader every other year becomes inevitable when the people are crying out for effective policy, and all the major political parties are able to offer them are ineffective personalities.

Jacinda Ardern’s and Grant Robertson’s accidental 2017 victory, plagued by indecision and ineptitude, received, unaccountably, the dubious benediction of the Covid Pandemic which, at least temporarily, allowed the state to resume its old role of New Zealand’s prime defender. How devastating it must have been for Labour to once again be required to surrender the state’s interventionist powers to their Treasury and the Reserve Bank jailers.

With nothing useful left to offer New Zealand economically, Labour’s lurch towards cultural revolution was entirely predictable. Where else do left-wing middle-class Gen-Xers go when all other roads are blocked – except to the road leading them back to the student union?

By the same token, where does the National Party go when the nation’s infrastructure is visibly crumbling, and the cost of fixing it cannot be met (without incurring the wrath of the neoliberal priesthood) by raising taxes, or taking advantage of the state’s ability to borrow capital more cheaply than the private sector? The answer would appear to be that it either starts venturing down the dark alleys of crony capitalism, or hanging-out with the counter-revolutionary culture-warriors of the Weirdo Right. Or both.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 16 September 2024.

The Only Other Reliable Vehicle.

An Elite Leader Awaiting Rotation? Hipkins’ give-National-nothing-to-aim-at strategy will only succeed if the Coalition becomes as unpopular in three years as the British Tories became in fourteen.

THE SHAPE OF CHRIS HIPKINS’ THINKING on Labour’s optimum pathway to re-election is emerging steadily. At the core of his strategy is Hipkins’ view of the Labour Party as the only other reliable vehicle for achieving an “orderly rotation of elites” – a position which defines the lowest respectable expectation of the democratic process.

Hipkins seems content to shadow the existing government’s policy options – with the single obvious exception of Crown-Māori relations. Were this not the case, the outcry of the Labour Opposition in regard to social-welfare policy, health policy, and even education policy would be much louder than has been the case to date.

A party representing “the preferential option for the poor”, which, as a political movement strongly influenced by the social teachings of both the Catholic and Methodist churches Labour most certainly was, right up until the late-1970s, would have a great deal more to say about the Coalition’s pestilential preference for sanctions over succour. That Labour’s statements on social policy and the poor have about them a decidedly pro-forma quality is, however, of a piece with the party’s real-world conduct when in power.

That Labour’s tax policy would have to be refashioned radically in anticipation of any genuine assault on poverty in New Zealand explains why it is currently the flashpoint of the party’s internal policy debates. Who holds the upper-hand in these debates is best registered by David Parker’s current caucus ranking. At No. 17 he is currently 13 places below Labour’s present Finance spokesperson, Barbara Edmond.

A Labour leader still firmly attached to his party’s founding principles would not have hesitated to allocate the finance portfolio to Parker. He was, after all, the person who, as Revenue Minister, presented his party with a tax package foreshadowing both a Wealth Tax and a progressive, tax-exempt, income threshold of $10,000. A package which also, significantly, enjoyed the support of the then Labour Finance Minister, Grant Robertson.

That the person who issued a “captain’s call” scotching the Parker/Robertson initiative is the same person who elevated Edmonds over Parker, is hardly to be wondered at. Chris Hipkins has little patience for such blatant social-democratic offerings. That a majority of Labour Party members are enthusiastic supporters of Parker’s progressive and redistributive tax suggestions, while very likely true, is also irrelevant. Rank-and-file preferences will not be enough to prevent “Captain” Hipkins from side-tracking his party away from tax reform in 2026.

Why would he not, when so many of the nation’s political journalists respond with Pavlovian reflexes whenever the word “tax” is mentioned? Hipkins is well aware of the damage done to Labour’s chances in election after election by the self-imposed necessity of having to stand in front of the cameras and explain to “hard-working New Zealanders” why the government should take more of their “hard-earned” income by increasing, and/or imposing new, taxes.

No, by far the best course of action, at least from Hipkins’ vantage-point, is the “small-target” strategy adopted by Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party in the run-up to the 4 July 2024 General Election. Napoleon Bonaparte is said to have advised his generals never to interrupt the enemy when he’s making a mistake. Starmer, in the same vein, determined to forbid his party from promising anything likely to distract the British voters from their all-consuming hate-affair with the Conservative Party. Did he care that this would deliver Labour only a default victory? Not a bit. With a 174-seat majority, he didn’t give a hoot.

But, Hipkins’ give-National-nothing-to-aim-at strategy will only succeed if the National-Act-NZ First Coalition Government becomes as unpopular in just three years as the Tories became in fourteen.

This is not the long-shot expectation which, at first sight, it might appear to be. Electorally, things only really turned sour for the Conservatives after Boris Johnson’s balls-ups. Prior to the tousle-haired one’s spectacular self-immolation, the Tory party seemed set for another ten years in office. It was only in the five years between their landslide win of December 2019 and the July 2024 election – a period that included the rigors of the Covid Pandemic – that the Tories’ hopes turned to ashes. Hipkins’ wager is that the Coalition’s fall from grace will be even faster.

And, in this, he may well be right. Driven by its smaller coalition partners, National finds itself in a place it has studiously (and very successfully) steered clear of since the social impact of the 1981 Springbok Tour solidified into the New Zealand electorate’s long-term and strong aversion to overtly racist political parties. Building on the impressive legacy of Jim Bolger and Doug Graham, National has taken care to paint itself as, if not the bosom buddy of Māori, then not their sworn enemy, either. That enviable achievement has been put at serious risk by National’s coalition agreement with Act and NZ First. If National is unable to shift Māori perceptions – and soon – then Hipkins is betting that, come 2026, the government will crash and burn.

Making free with the matches and gasoline will be, variously, the judiciary, academia, the public service, and the mainstream news media. Hipkins and his potential coalition allies in the Greens and Te Pāti Māori know that the impression left upon Māori and their Pakeha allies by the Coalition’s “anti-Māori” policies is already so deep and so negative as to render its wholesale elimination impossible. Any further refusals to apply the policy brakes risk up-ending the whole ethnically-charged mess into the nation’s streets.

That will not be pretty.

Some idea of what the country might expect is conveyed in blogger and podcaster, Martyn Bradbury’s review of “Autaia – Haka Theatre” staged in the Kiri Te Kanawa Theatre of Auckland’s Aotea Centre last Wednesday. This is how he describes the behaviour of the mostly young, mostly Māori, capacity audience’s reaction to projected images of the Coalition’s leaders:

During one of the performances, Seymour, Winston and Luxon come up in the background and when they did, all hell broke loose. The gasp of shock from the combined audience that these hated figures would suddenly appear in huge form in front of them was startling, and then that gasp of oxygen ignited with a fury and outrage that exploded from the lungs of over 2000 as they roared in naked rage at the three of them. It was like that moment in 1984 when they all start yelling at Goldstein. It was glorious.

This is the anger that Hipkins and his Praetorian Guard – Carmel Sepuloni, Megan Woods, Barbara Edmonds – are counting on. This is why they are surreptitiously shadowing National in respect of most of its policies unrelated to Māori and te Tiriti.

It is the Labour leadership’s calculation that if a major outburst of Māori rage occurs, and the state’s difficulty in bringing the situation under control is painfully exposed, then all that will be required is for Labour and its allies (by now both suitably house-trained) to step forward with the clear message that, as custodians of the “public welfare, peace and tranquility” of Aotearoa-New Zealand, National and its coalition partners have failed. To secure an orderly rotation of political elites, and put an end to the dangerous racial tension, New Zealanders must fulfil the most basic of their democratic duties – electing a government equal to the task of keeping its citizens from each other’s throats.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 26 August 2024.

Can The Left Assemble A Winning Coalition?

Voting Together? Collectively, Māori and Pasifika workers, professionals and managers employed by the state, and “progressive” Baby-Boomer superannuitants, possess the electoral clout to defeat the Coalition Government. But will they?

TO WIN THE NEXT ELECTION, “The Left”, as we still rather hopefully refer to it, needs three key demographics. Voting together, the Māori and Pasifika working class, professional-managerial staff employed by the state, and “progressive” Baby Boomer superannuitants, cannot fail to return a combination of Labour, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori to the Treasury Benches. The Left’s great challenge, as it approaches 2026, is developing an electoral pitch capable of mustering all three – and keeping them mustered – until the people’s votes have been cast and counted.

Voting together, Māori and Pasifika workers, professionals and managers employed by the state, and “progressive” Baby-Boomer superannuitants, can defeat the Coalition Government. But will they?

It’s a tall order. None of these groups present a homogeneous mass guaranteed to respond with Pavlovian reliability to the Left’s electoral stimuli.

Although in excess of three-quarters of Māori live in towns and cities, and are employed in occupations traditionally designated as working-class, the appeals of the left-wing parties are seldom presented in ways that prioritise the challenges of urban, working-class, Māori life. Indeed, they are much more likely to be presented with by policies reflecting the priorities of the iwi-based capitalists dominating the Iwi Leaders’ Forum.

The powerfully nationalist flavour of the Forum’s determination to “build the Māori Economy” obscures the socio-economic deprivation of its urbanised working class. The latter’s decline is reflected in the alarming statistic that, fifty years ago, more than half of urban Māori owned their own home, while, today, that figure has fallen to less than one-fifth. Even so, the social costs of liberalising the New Zealand economy, borne so disproportionately by Māori workers (especially those in the freezing and forestry industries) are only rarely presented unequivocally in class terms by the parliamentary Left. Certainly, in this century, Māori deprivation is much more commonly attributed to the ongoing impact of white supremacist “colonisation”.

Of the three left-wing parliamentary parties, Labour has by far the best chance of garnering the votes of Māori workers. To remind itself how this might be done, it has only to watch the television and social-media advertising Labour broadcast to voters in the Māori seats back in 2017. Whether by accident or design these ads proved to be little masterpieces of class-based communication. They portrayed the life-world of urban Māori in a way that conveyed both understanding and admiration. Unsurprisingly, Labour won all seven Māori Seats.

Pasifika workers’ loyalty to the Labour Party, and the impact of their votes, is legendary. The power of the “South Auckland booths” to save the day for Labour was never demonstrated to greater effect than in 2005 when, late in the evening, the votes cast by the Pasifika community tipped the scales in Labour’s favour, denying Don Brash’s National Party the victory which, just 72 hours earlier, had seem a dead cert.

That the surge in Pasifika voting had been achieved by Labour’s eccentric reading of the National Party’s housing policy is less enthusiastically recalled. Certainly, since 2005, there is evidence of the old adage “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me” gradually but unmistakably diminishing Pasifika voter participation. In 2008 Labour supporters waited in vain for the South Auckland booths to “come in”. They are still waiting.

Could it be that the failure of Labour’s Pasifika Social Development minister to implement welfare policies that would have benefitted Pasifika working-class families hugely has convinced them that it is wiser to be guided by Labour’s deeds than its words. Delivering their vital support not in recognition of promises made, but in gratitude for promises delivered.

But, if the votes of Māori and Pasifika workers must be earned, then the votes of the state-employed members of the professional-managerial class are pretty much a given. It is, after all, the class responsible for supplanting the Pakeha working-class that had ruled Labour from the party’s foundation in 1916 to the “Rogernomics” reforms of the 1980s. Young, university-educated, and openly disdainful of the conservative social mores of most of New Zealand’s working-class families, these were the ones who deliberately transformed Labour from a mass party to a cadre party – them being the cadres – in the decade spanning 1990 and 2000.

And there was no coming back for the workers – not when their unions had also been taken over by the meritocratic beneficiaries of Labour’s welfare state. No, the state-employed professionals and managers will vote Labour, overwhelmingly, because Labour has made itself the party of state-employed professionals and managers.

Any credible indication that Labour is returning to its working-class roots: prioritising what Chris Hipkins dubbed, euphemistically, “bread and butter issues”; is likely to be answered by a wholesale shift of state-sector employee support to the Greens in protest. This largely confirms the Green Party’s’ status as a handy escape-pod from Labour’s mother-ship.

Regardless of their faux-Marxist rhetoric, the Greens have always been, and show every sign of continuing to be, a party of middle-class utopians, stubbornly unreconcilable with a world that consistently fails to follow their excellent advice. That they have turned into something more substantial will be made evident only when the bulk of their electoral support ceases to be concentrated in the university suburbs of Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin.

For the “progressive” Baby-Boomer superannuitants observing these peregrinations of the Left from the safety and security of their mortgage-free villas and/or swanky retirement villages, the once straight-forward business of casting a vote is growing increasingly fraught. Their great advantage (or disadvantage – it rather depends on one’s point of view) is that their memories of the “old”, twentieth century, New Zealand are every bit as vivid as their encounters with the twenty-first’s “Aotearoa”.

Sadly, this ability to compare and contrast is of little use. Like every younger generation in the long history of humankind, their own children and grandchildren have little time, and even less patience, for the ideological antiques so prized by their parents and grandparents.

Gen-X and the rest of the generational alphabet show every sign of being completely relaxed about pronouns; will “chest-feed” their own offspring without ontological misgivings; and enthusiastically celebrate their shape-shifting Treaty as a very good thing indeed. They simply cannot understand their elders’ reluctance to meet the requirements of diversity, equity and inclusion.

What’s worse, the “progressive” Baby Boomers do not seem to be sufficiently seized by the awfulness of the National-Act-NZ First Coalition. As beneficiaries are bashed and te Tiriti is trashed, the “democratic-socialists” of yesteryear witter on interminably about free speech, feminism, and the colour-blind content of a person’s character. Whatever happened to taking one for the left-wing team?

It probably ceased when the left-wing team started playing a different game.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 19 August 2024.

Earning The Huia Feather.

Still Waiting: Māori land remains in the hands of Non-Māori. The broken promises of the Treaty remain broken. The mana of the tangata whenua languishes under racist neglect. The right to wear the huia feather remains as elusive as ever. Perhaps these three transformations are beyond the power of a Pakeha Labour leader to accomplish?

THE NEW ZEALAND LABOUR PARTY is 108 years old. By a wide margin, that makes it this country’s longest-lived political party. In all those 108 years, however, Labour has never given itself anything other than Pakeha leadership.

In spite of its claim to be the historical custodians of New Zealand’s progressive traditions, on the question of race Labour has allowed itself to be outstripped by all the other political parties currently represented in Parliament.

National elected Simon Bridges, the Greens chose Metiria Turei and Marama Davidson. Act’s leader, David Seymour, has been acquainting himself with his Māori roots for several years now. Te Pāti Māori speaks for itself. And then there’s Winston.

But the list of Labour’s leader’s is like a flour sack – white from top to bottom.

On the face of it, this is strange. Back in the 1920s, the Labour Party published a popular newspaper called The Maoriland Worker – “Maoriland” being in common usage on both sides of the Tasman as an alternative to “New Zealand”.

It is interesting, however, that as Labour edged ever closer to power in the 1930s, The Maoriland Worker became (much less colourfully) The Standard. Keen to pick up the votes of those who eked a living off land that had once belonged to Māori, “Maoriland” had simply become too contentious a word for Labour to retain.

Labour’s association with the Ratana Church, which ultimately delivered all the Māori seats into Labour’s hands, might also be supposed to have significantly improved the prospects of a Māori politician becoming Labour’s leader. Especially when one considers the fact that it was only Labour’s hold on the four Māori seats that allowed it to go on governing between 1946 and 1949. Had the Māori seats not existed, National would have assumed office a whole three years earlier than it did.

When the Ratana leader and prophet, Tahupotiki Wiremu Ratana, first met the Labour leader, Michael Joseph Savage, in 1936, he is said to given him four objects: a potato, a broken gold watch, a pounamu hei-tiki, and a huia feather.

The potato symbolised the loss of Māori land, along with the sustenance it provided; the broken promises of the Treaty of Waitangi were represented by the broken watch; and the precious greenstone carving stood for the mana of the Māori people. Restore these three, prophesied Ratana, and Labour will have earned the right to wear the huia feather – the sign of chiefly status. So precious were these taonga to the Australian-born Savage that, when he died in 1940, they were buried with him.

If T.W. Ratana really did possess the foresight attributed to him by his many thousands of followers, it is to be wondered who it was that he saw, looking far into the future, wearing the sacred huia feather: a Pakeha, or a Māori?

Last night, in England, the leader of Labour’s Māori caucus, Willie Jackson, was accorded the same honour as the New Zealand Prime Minister, David Lange, when he addressed the members of the Oxford Union. Curiously enough, debating at Oxford University is not the only thing the Labour List MP has in common with Lange. Jackson’s home in Mangere Bridge formerly belonged to the charismatic Labour leader.

It was on Lange’s watch that the changes which transformed New Zealand economically and socially, “Rogernomics”, were introduced. At the end of that process, however, the three transformational challenges embodied in T.W. Ratana’s three symbolic gifts to Mickey Savage remained unmet.

They still are.

Māori land remains in the hands of Non-Māori. The broken promises of the Treaty remain broken. The mana of the tangata whenua languishes under racist neglect. The right to wear the huia feather remains as elusive as ever. Perhaps these three transformations are beyond the power of a Pakeha Labour leader to accomplish?

And they cannot be carried out behind the scenes, quietly and bureaucratically. Willie Jackson and his Māori colleagues tried that route – and it cost Labour the Treasury Benches. If the three transformations of T.W. Ratana are to be accomplished, then it will only happen in the full light of day, with the backing of all New Zealanders – Pakeha as well as Māori.

Labour will not shake off its political lassitude until it gives a Māori MP the chance to fulfil Ratana’s expectations – and earn the huia feather.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 24 May 2024.

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.