Jacinda’s Political Faith Broader Than Any Church.

Keeping The Faith: This Government’s broad, new, heavily moderated, progressive faith does not require a prime minister with the powers of a medieval pope. Jacinda’s regime has no need of subterranean torture chambers to ensure compliance. A gift for diplomacy and the ability to inspire her fellow human-beings is all the prime minister requires, and fortunately she had both of those qualities – in spades! Call it “The Incredible Lightness of Being Jacinda”.

AS ELECTION-YEAR GAME-PLANS go, it’s a good one. Why bother to reconstruct Labour as a “broad church” when the same effect can be achieved by creating a broad political “faith” out of three separate parties? Broad churches were mandated by the first-past-the-post electoral system; proportional representation allows a broad faith to have “many mansions” – and even more voters.

Jacinda Ardern was quick to see the possibilities. Many people marvelled at how well she and Winston Peters hit it off during the crucial days of negotiation following the 2017 election. One explanation had Peters intuiting that Labour’s new leader just might be willing to sing the same “Hallelujah Song” he’d been humming quietly since 1993. With the benefit of hindsight, however, it is equally plausible to argue that Jacinda saw in Peters and NZ First precisely the sort of social-conservative hand-brake she and her government needed to protect itself from Labour’s policy enthusiasts and the chronically “woke” Greens.

What emerged was an extraordinarily shrewd division of labour among the three parties making up the Government’s parliamentary majority. In the past, such a division had to be accomplished within a single political formation. For every warm and fuzzy Cabinet Minister offering peace, love and mung beans, there had to be a hard-faced conservative bastard preaching hellfire and brimstone. Preventing these clearly contradictory political tendencies from dividing the party membership into angry and antagonistic factions required a pretty brutal set of leadership skills and a determination to keep intra-party democracy on a very tight leash.

What Peters was offering Jacinda was a conservative faction positioned safely beyond the reach of her liberal and radical allies. The Labour and Green parties’ rank-and-file could come up with as many wild and woolly schemes as they liked: capital gains taxes; lowering the voting age to sixteen; a swingeing Carbon Tax; a radically down-sized dairy herd. But, while Winston and his team remained on watch, no such measures would ever make it through Cabinet. The same, of course, applied, in reverse, if ever NZ First’s hellfire and brimstone got too smelly.

Best of all, this broad, heavily moderated, progressive faith did not require a prime minister with the powers of a medieval pope. Jacinda’s regime had no need of subterranean torture chambers to ensure compliance. A gift for diplomacy and the ability to inspire her fellow human-beings was all the new prime minister required, and she had both of those qualities – in spades! Call it “The Incredible Lightness of Being Jacinda”.

There is, naturally, a weakness in this new arrangement. And, oh, how Jacinda must have hoped and prayed that her potential political nemesis, Simon Bridges, didn’t spot it. That weakness arises out of NZ First’s capacity to form alliances with the party to its right as well as to its left. Press Peters and his people too hard, or, even worse, deny them their heart’s desire, and they’ll start packing-up their suitcases and ordering an Uber. Robbed of its conservative brake, Jacinda’s government would find itself required to say “No” all on its own. Dark clouds would soon overtake the Prime Minister’s sunny disposition. Recrimination and division would weaken Labour and the Green in ways that would be as hard to hide as they were to heal.

The first question Napoleon Bonaparte is said to have asked whenever a senior officer was recommended for promotion was: “Is he lucky?” Can it be doubted that Jacinda would have climbed very high in Napoleon’s Grand Armee? Has New Zealand ever had such a lucky prime minister? And has a New Zealand Leader of the Opposition ever provided his principal political rival with such a valuable gift?

By unequivocally ruling out NZ First as a possible coalition partner for National, Bridges has bolted Jacinda’s conservative handbrake firmly in place. Some might argue that this can only weaken Peters’ position. Surely, Bridges’ decision means that calling an Uber is no longer an option for NZ First? After all, where’s Winston gonna go? The problem with this argument is that the parliamentary arithmetic only changes once every three years. After the votes have been counted, the numbers remain the numbers until the next election. And right there is where things get tricky.

With her right flank secured, Jacinda can now re-orient her government decisively towards the moderate centre. If her more radical supporters don’t like the idea of Labour building National’s roads, well, they can always bugger-off to the Greens. A move about which Jacinda, recalling her days on Tony Blair’s Third Way, can remain “intensely relaxed”. Because it just doesn’t matter whether the “woke” voters stay with Labour, or decamp to the Greens. Their voices continue to swell the progressive choir in either location.

But wait – there’s more. As Labour bulks up its vote by adopting policies dear to the heart of the moderate centre, and the Greens’ support is enlarged by Labour’s disgruntled progressive defectors, the awful prospect arises (from the perspective of moderate conservatives) of New Zealand electing its first, genuine Red-Green government. Better, surely, to head-off the possibility of an uninhibited left-wing government casting aside the clothing of common sense and getting all jiggy with the capitalist status quo, by making very sure they’re accompanied by a conservative NZ First chaperone!

Such is the delicious flexibility of this broad, new, ideologically ecumenical, political faith. The broad political churches of yesteryear were never able to be so accommodating!

One can only imagine Bridges’ dismay when he is finally forced to acknowledge that ruling out any kind of deal with NZ First was a very, very big mistake. When he realises that, in this country, both the Right and the Left only ever get to the seat of power by finding themselves a clear path to the Centre.

Jim Bolger, bless him, understood this – which is why he saved his prime-ministership by reaching out to Winston, on his left. Helen Clark understood it, too – which is why she was willing to break Rod Donald’s left-wing heart by making centrist Winston Peters’ day. Jacinda is a natural when it comes to inclusion – which is why she lost no time in learning how to sing Winston’s Hallelujah Song.

Simon Bridges, by making sure National remains a narrow political faith, has allowed Jacinda to further broaden her government’s ecumenical appeal.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 7 February 2020.

Little’s “Broad Church” Widens Labour’s Appeal.

Pondering The Counterfactual: How many more percentage points might Labour have advanced in the latest One News Colmar Brunton poll had “discontented party activists” not spent the week prior to its execution demonstrating rank disunity and ideological extremism?

 

ONE SWALLOW does not make a summer, any more than a two-percentage-point lift in the latest One News Colmar-Brunton poll amounts to a massive political vindication. What Labour’s marginal rise in popularity does signal, however, is some very unhelpful news for some very unhelpful people.

 

Why do I say that? Because the furore over Willie Jackson’s return to the Labour Party can now be put in its more immediate context.

 

Before exploring that context, however, a word or two about polling.

 

Both of the major political parties have their own “internal” pollsters (David Farrar and Curia Research in the case of National, Stephen Mills and UMR for Labour) and both know when their researchers are in the field. Indeed, they often time their public policy pronouncements to coincide with such polling.

 

For very similar reasons most senior political operatives and public relations mavens also like to know when media-commissioned agencies like Colmar Brunton are on the job and when their results will be published.

 

In a society as small as New Zealand, acquiring such intelligence is relatively straightforward. Most of the people who believe they need to know, know someone who really does know when a poll is about to get underway.

 

The fieldwork for the Colmar Brunton poll that was broadcast on One News on Sunday, 19 February, was conducted between 11 and 15 February 2017.

 

This is significant, because in the week prior to the survey the Labour leader, Andrew Little, found himself under vicious attack from persons (including Poto Williams, the Labour MP for Christchurch North) opposed to Labour’s strategic recruitment of the broadcaster, community organiser, and former Alliance MP, Willie Jackson.

 

That Williams consulted a Christchurch public relations firm, Inform PR, to shape her criticism of Little, and to assist her in distributing the resulting statement to selected political journalists, prior to posting it on her Facebook page, struck many observers as odd. Now that we know Colmar Brunton was scheduled to be in the field by the end of the week, William’s behaviour appears much less so.

 

The same applies to the letter of protest posted on Facebook by members of Labour’s youth wing – Young Labour. Like William’s media statement, this document attracted considerable media attention throughout the week, especially after two former Labour MPs, Maryan Street and Marian Hobbs, added their signatures to the document.

 

Throughout the week Little was required to endure the less-than-friendly attentions of the parliamentary press gallery, as well as a succession of highly critical opinion pieces questioning his political judgement and challenging his commitment to Labour’s quest for gender parity.

 

By the end of the week, the proprietor of the POLITIK blog, Richard Harman, was reporting that:

 

“The events last week [5-11 February] seem to be connected to what has been what one senior party source described as a ‘parallel universe’ of discontented party activists who have been active on the left-wing blog ‘The Standard’ and who also organised to promote candidates for office within the party.”

 

It is, therefore, very tempting to see, with the benefit of hindsight, the timing of the criticism of Little’s recruitment of Jackson as something more than coincidental. If Harman’s “discontented party activists” had prior knowledge of when the Colmar Brunton survey would be in the field, it is not difficult to fathom why they might be tempted to seize upon the opportunity to put a spanner in the Leader’s works.

 

Clearly, there are many in Labour’s ranks who do not like the idea of the party once again becoming a “broad church”. How better to prove the unwisdom of Little’s policy than to orchestrate a week-long outpouring of protest against the Jackson recruitment, culminating in a falling-off in support for Labour – and Little – as measured in the oh-so-conveniently scheduled Colmar Brunton survey?

 

Except, of course, the campaign failed to achieve its objective. Far from registering a falling-off of support for Labour, the poll revealed a small, but very welcome, rise in support. At last, Labour was back in the 30s – an important morale-boost for both the caucus and the wider party. The recruitment of Jackson and the selection of the former Police Association President, Greg O’Connor, had produced precisely the effect which Little and his team had be working for.

 

The question that cannot be avoided, however, is as straightforward as it is disconcerting: How many more percentage points might Labour have advanced in the Colmar Brunton poll had “discontented party activists” not spent the week prior to its execution demonstrating rank disunity and ideological extremism?

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Monday, 20 February 2017.

Just How ‘Broad’ Was Labour’s Church?

On The Right Of The Left: Raised in the public works camps of the Great Depression; organiser for the Workers Union; staunch anti-communist: Ron Bailey held the Heretaunga electorate in the Hutt Valley from 1960 until 1981. Few Labour parliamentarians have exemplified more vividly the ideological elasticity of Labour's "broad church".

 

THE FIRST LABOUR CANDIDATE I ever voted for was Ron Bailey. He’d inherited the Hutt Valley seat of Heretaunga from Labour’s outstanding Minister of Trade & Industry, Phil Holloway, in 1960. Encompassing a good part of the Hutt Valley’s manufacturing industries, the Heretaunga electorate was about as safe as any aspiring Labour MP could wish. Having won it, Heretaunga should have been Bailey’s for life.

 

Not that I knew anything about Ron Bailey as I conscientiously drew a line through the names of all the other candidates on my ballot paper. (I must confess, however, to hesitating over that of the Values Party candidate, J.M. Overton.) As a callow 19 year-old, I cared a great deal less about the personal histories of the candidates than I did about the parties they represented.

 

I cast my first vote for Labour in 1975 to honour Norman Kirk’s legacy. His leadership had impressed me tremendously. From the dispatch of a New Zealand frigate to the French atomic testing site at Mururoa, to the cancellation of the 1973 Springbok Tour, Kirk laid down a template for moral clarity and political courage by which I, and many thousands of other young New Zealanders, could judge his successors.

 

I was also voting for the self-evident decency of Kirk’s political heir, Bill Rowling; the progressive education policies of Phil Amos; and the radical social vision of Labour’s Attorney General, Dr Martyn Finlay. Theirs were the democratic socialist stars by which I allowed myself to be guided. Against such a flaring legacy, the star of Ron Bailey, Minister of Railways, shone only dimly.

 

Had I bothered to investigate the background of the man I was voting for, I would have been, by turns, both impressed and appalled.

 

Born in 1926, Bailey spent his childhood years in the infamous public works camps of the Great Depression. In his 2015 obituary of Bailey Dominion Post journalist Tom Fitzsimons describes the sort of places that five-year-old Ron would have called home: “His family lived in two conjoined gable-style tents with wooden floorboards, a corrugated-iron fireplace, no sink or bath, and kerosene lamps for light.”

 

Bailey’s political career didn’t really get started until he was 29, when he became an organiser for the New Zealand Workers Union. That was in 1956, and he must have impressed his fellow unionists as a go-getter because just four years later he was the Labour MP for Heretaunga.

 

If you’re thinking Bailey was some sort of socialist firebrand, then think again. Like so many of his conservative working-class contemporaries in both the unions and the Labour Party (including Kirk himself) Bailey was a staunch anti-communist. Indeed, in 1975, when I first voted for him, Bailey was, allegedly, an active member of the New Zealand chapter of the World Anti-Communist League (WACL) a sinister, far-right outfit with its origins in Chiang Kai-shek’s Republic of China (Taiwan).

Reading between the lines of Bailey’s obituary, it would seem that his far-right views had, by the early 1980s, become so extreme (WACL was exposed as having ties to neo-Nazi death-squads) that even in Rowling’s broad Labour church they could no longer be tolerated. Amid the dramatic upheavals of 1981 – the year of the Springbok Tour – Bailey was somehow prevailed upon to step aside for the affable (and considerably more moderate) lawyer, Bill Jeffries.

 

The curious career of Ron Bailey illustrates just how widely the net of Labour’s candidate recruitment was flung in the 1950s and 60s. The party was very far from being a monolithic organisation for the very simple reason that its core working-class and professional middle-class constituencies were themselves anything but monolithic. Staunch anti-communist trade unionists like Bailey were joined in Labour’s caucus by radical Christian socialists like Hastings MP, Richard Mayson. The social-conservative Kirk sat at the same Cabinet Table as the social-radical Finlay.

 

For those politicians who prefer their parties to cleave to just one line, Labour’s “broad church” must sound like hell-on-earth. As a left-wing Labour Party activist – against whom the Rogernomics-supporting “Backbone Club” (of which Ron Bailey was the Auckland convenor) regularly hurled thunderbolts, I can certainly vouch for it being a very hard slog.

 

What I must also vouch for, however, is that even in a disastrous election year, like 1975, Labour’s “broad church” could still attract 39.6 percent of the popular vote.

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday 10 February 2017.

Conflicting Priorities: Has Poto Williams just cost Labour the 2017 Election?

Queen Of Fools, Or Pawn In Someone Else's Game? Poto Williams' very public intervention against Willie Jackson has inflicted considerable damage - not only to Andrew Little and Labour, but also to her own political future. Was the offending media release (allegedly prepared and distributed by a Christchurch PR firm) all her own work, or did someone put her up to it? And, if so, then who is responsible? Cui bono?

 

POTO WILLIAMS’ very public criticism of Willie Jackson’s return to Labour has done huge damage to her party’s re-election chances. At a stroke, her ill-disciplined and (presumably) unsanctioned outburst has undermined the positive perceptions created by the joint Labour/Green state-of-the-nation event of 29 January. All of those “good vibrations” (to quote TV3’s Patrick Gower) have been drowned out by the high-pitched screeching of identity politics. Too wrapped up in their quest for a gender-balanced caucus to recognise the strategic importance of Andrew Little’s eleventh-hour recruitment of Jackson, Williams and her supporters have cost Labour tens-of-thousands of urban Maori (and Pakeha!) votes.

 

Little’s own quest: to reconstitute Labour’s “broad church”; is clearly considered secondary to the Labour Women’s Council’s determination to achieve a gender-balanced caucus in 2017 – as mandated by the Party’s recently revised constitution.

 

The recent recruitment of Greg O’Connor to contest the critically important Ohariu electorate has ruffled more than a few progressive feathers. (The Left deems the former policeman to be a rock-ribbed social conservative.) With the surprise return of Jackson to Labour (on the promise of a favourable position on the Party List) these already fragile feathers have started flying in all directions.

 

Predictably, it is Jackson’s on-air grilling of “Amy” during the so-called “Roast Busters” scandal of 2013 that is being used to discredit his candidacy. That Jackson, along with his co-host John Tamihere, were merely giving voice the doubts and reservations of a great many of their listeners (as talkback hosts are wont to do) has never been accepted by their critics. In the binary world of Identity Politics there is only space for rape-culture Devils and victimised Angels. “Devil’s Advocates” need not apply.

 

That there were many people living in South and West Auckland (and across New Zealand) who considered “Willie & JT” to also be victims of the Roast Busters scandal does not appear to have crossed the minds of their detractors. That these same people may have interpreted the fate of their talkback champions as proof of how little the Left has to offer voters like themselves either did not occur to the avenging angels of Identity Politics, or, if it did, was considered a price worth paying.

 

For Identity Politicians the psephological consequences of such moral crusading are matters of supreme unimportance. According to one recent analysis: “The correlation between voting National in 2014 and being male was 0.35, which was significant. This was mirrored on the centre-left: the correlation between voting Labour in 2014 and being female was 0.31.” Never mind. That National is well on the way to becoming the blokes’ party matters much less than ensuring a fifty/fifty split between men and women in Labour’s caucus. The question of whether or not guaranteeing gender parity should be accorded a higher priority than winning the election itself is studiously avoided.

 

As Labour’s leader, Little does not have the luxury of remaining indifferent to the demographic composition of his party’s voting support. In the simplest terms, his mission is to move voters from National’s column to Labour’s. Or, failing that, to lure out of the Non-Vote a large enough body of voters to nudge the election in Labour’s favour. Attracting votes to Labour is, however, unlikely if the party is perceived as subscribing to ideas and values radically at odds with the ideas and values of the voters to whom it is appealing.

 

Hence Greg O’Connor and Willie Jackson. For the working-class people who are, overwhelmingly, the principal victims of criminal offending, the idea of having the former boss of the Police Association in Parliament is likely to sound pretty good. To urban Maori, having the head of the Manukau Urban Maori Authority, Willie Jackson, representing them in Parliament may be similarly appealing – especially since so many voters already feel they know him from his afternoon talkback show on Radio Live.

 

Little’s announcement of O’Connor and Jackson was another important step in his carefully calibrated plan to reposition Labour in the minds of the voters. The intention is to change people’s perceptions of the party. From being seen as the political vehicle for highly-educated, politically-correct professionals living in metropolitan New Zealand, Labour’s election strategists are hoping to reclaim its original identity as the party for ordinary working people and their families.

 

Yes, O’Connor and Jackson may jar the sensibilities of inner-city Wellington and Grey Lynn, but they may also reassure less well-heeled Labour supporters that they represent something more than dull-witted but reliable voting-fodder. By providing such reassurance, Little hopes to avoid the fate of Hillary Clinton’s Democratic Party, which came to be seen by too many working-class Americans as a machine with only one function. To turn out enough people like themselves to elect candidates not even remotely like themselves to Congress and the White House.

 

Poto Williams’ reckless intervention has done enormous damage to Little’s plan. Memories of the “Man Ban” and of David Cunliffe’s tragic “I’m sorry I’m a man” comment have been revived. Even worse, socially conservative New Zealanders have been reminded of the remorseless pillorying of two working-class Maori men by a swarm of (mostly) Pakeha liberals.

 

Poto Williams’ unsanctioned attack on Willie Jackson has conveyed to conservative working-class New Zealanders the following, fatal, message. In neon-lit letters ten metres high she has proclaimed:  “Labour’s priorities are not your priorities.”

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Monday, 6 February 2017.

Inspirational Radicalism.

Labour's Broad Church In Action: The social-radical, Dr Martyn Finlay, campaigns alongside the social-conservative, Norman Kirk. A political party must be able to reassure young voters that the ideas, hopes and aspirations of their generation are well represented within the parliamentary system. Without that reassurance, a party risks turning itself into a generational redoubt where the achievements of the past are celebrated constantly, but where the anticipated achievements of the future are either dismissed or deferred indefinitely.

 

THE STORY may be apocryphal, but it has stayed with me for more than 40 years. The liberal Labour lawyer and MP, Dr Martyn Finlay, responding to the fearsome reputation of the recently opened maximum security prison at Paremoremo, is said to have observed that no prison should be escape-proof – lest it crush men’s souls.

 

Even by today’s standards, Finlay’s views come across as radically progressive. Back in the early 1970s, a time when the Labour Party was still beholden to its many conservative supporters, statements of such uncompromising radicalism were astonishing. Unsurprisingly, Finlay’s equally radical views on abortion, homosexuality and euthanasia made him a controversial and polarising Member of Parliament. His boss, Norman Kirk, was not a fan.

 

For a great many members of the “Vietnam Generation” (as political journalist Colin James dubbed the youthful rebels of the 1960s and 70s) Finlay’s social radicalism was inspirational. His ability to infuse the political process with urgent ethical purpose acted as an ideological and generational bridge between the children of the Great Depression and the Second World War, and the obstreperous beneficiaries of post-war affluence and optimism. In the language of that long-ago time: Finlay linked the Old Left with the New.

 

It was a vital exercise in political chemistry. A political party must be able to reassure young voters that the ideas, hopes and aspirations of their generation are well represented within the parliamentary system. It must also instil confidence that their agenda for change has every chance of achieving legislative expression – and sooner, rather than later. Without that reassurance and confidence, a party risks turning itself into a generational redoubt. An isolated ideological fortress, in which the achievements of the past are celebrated constantly; but where the anticipated achievements of the future are either dismissed or deferred indefinitely.

 

This was the party that Labour had become by the late 1940s, when the heroes of 1935 told the party’s younger and more radical members that they should cease their agitating because “everything is done”. It wasn’t until the much more intelligent and open-minded Arnold Nordmeyer finally succeeded the deeply conservative Walter Nash, and was joined in Labour’s caucus by Norman Kirk, Bob Tizard, Bill Rowling, Phil Amos and Martyn Finlay himself, that Labour’s forward march was resumed with vigour.

 

Looking at the endless stream of media releases emanating from today’s Labour Opposition, it is impossible to identify a figure even remotely comparable to Finlay. In 2017, there is simply no way that Labour’s media minders would allow an MP to declare, in the name of human dignity, that no prison should be designed to eliminate the possibility of escape.

 

The very idea that such an audacious and jarring pronouncement might provoke the electorate into thinking about the crushing realities of prison life; or challenge them to decide whether rehabilitation is even possible for a prisoner from whom all hope has departed; would be dismissed as politically suicidal.

 

When David Cunliffe, moved by the devastating evidence of domestic abuse, delivered his Finlay-like apology to the 2014 Women’s Refuge symposium: ‘‘Can I begin by saying I’m sorry – I don’t often say it – I’m sorry for being a man, right now. Because family and sexual violence is perpetrated overwhelmingly by men against women and children”; the news media (and his colleagues) tore him to shreds.

 

But, if Labour is unwilling to tolerate a twenty-first version of Martyn Finlay, then how can it hope to construct the bridge to the future it so desperately needs? Norman Kirk may not have welcomed Finlay’s radical outpourings, but he endured them. Andrew Little is nowhere near as flexible. While Canada’s Justin Trudeau prepares to legalise cannabis, the leader of New Zealand’s Labour Party delivers ponderous homilies about its danger to young people.

 

While tomorrow’s voters grow increasingly desperate to hear a Labour MP willing to proclaim, without equivocation, the need to break definitively from the failed neoliberal experiments of the past, the party clings ever more tightly to the social liberalism by which it chose to define itself thirty years ago. With the bloody injuries of class everywhere on display, Labour stubbornly refuses to select a candidate capable of describing them.

 

If Labour wishes to avoid becoming a moribund relic, then it must learn, again, how to infuse New Zealand politics with Martyn Finlay’s radical moral purpose.

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 20 January 2017.