A Better Poll.

Bogus? So devastating was the latest One News/Colmar Brunton poll result for Labour that the Opposition leader, Andrew Little, declared it "bogus". In desperation, Labour released its own - vastly more encouraging - internal poll data from UMR Research. Unfortunately, in political terms, this is a bit like presenting an affidavit testifying to your beauty and intelligence, signed by your Mum.

 

ANDREW LITTLE has described the latest One News-Colmar Brunton poll as “bogus”. He insists that “other polls” show the Labour Party doing much better than Colmar Brunton’s figure of 26 percent.

 

It’s a comment that recalls the famous World War I cartoon in which two British soldiers are depicted taking cover in a shell-crater in the middle of No Man’s Land. “If you know of a better hole,” says the first soldier to the second, “then go to it.” Little’s statement merits a similar dose of mordant humour: “If you know of a better poll, Andrew, then show it.” (And, no, that is not an invitation to show us your own!)

 

Regardless of its severity, it was tactically foolish of Little to deny the accuracy of Colmar Brunton’s latest survey. The Labour Leader should have anticipated that National’s chief pollster, David Farrar, would have all the relevant facts and figures at his fingertips. With impish glee, Farrar swiftly posted these on his Kiwiblog website:

 

“At the last election in September 2014 this same poll [Colmar Brunton] had Labour at 25.2%. They got 25.1%. They were very accurate for Labour. In fact it was National they got a bit wrong with a poll of 45.1% vs an actual election result of 47.0%”

 

When presented with terrible news, it is perfectly natural for human-beings to take refuge in denial. The reactions of ordinary human-beings are not, however, available to those who aspire to political leadership. Upon hearing the poll result, it was Little’s duty to thrust aside his disappointment and deliver a response that would help, rather than hinder, his party’s cause.

 

The most obvious rejoinder to a poll showing the Government’s opponents severally commanding 50 percent of the Party Vote would be to emphasise the enormous political cost of disunity. Little should have pointed to the National Party’s consistent success in rallying centre-right voters behind a single banner – its own. He should then have invited centre-left voters to imagine the outcome if, instead of dividing their support between Labour (26 percent) the Greens (13 percent) and NZ First (11 percent), they had followed the example of their right-wing counterparts and swung their support decisively behind the largest opposition party.

 

How differently the story would be presented if, instead of languishing in the mid-20s, Labour was seen to be level-pegging with National. Would David Farrar be responding to that sort of result with impish glee? Probably not.

 

Enter the massive strategic problem created by Labour’s decision to negotiate a “Memorandum of Understanding” (MoU) with the Greens. In signing that MoU, Little and his colleagues were effectively admitting that their party’s former, dominant position on the centre-left was irrecoverable. They were also denying Labour the “Unity is Strength!” rallying cry that National used to such good effect in 2005, and which has served them so well in every election since.

 

It is worth recalling here how tempting it must have been for National to similarly surrender its electoral primacy. It had, after all, sustained a much worse defeat in 2002 than Labour’s 2014 debacle. At just 21 percent, National’s Party Vote could easily have persuaded Bill English and his colleagues to embrace the politics of permanent coalition. This was what the logic of MMP dictated: National and Labour simply had to accept that the days of parties registering support in the high-40s had gone forever.

 

Tell that to John Key! The latest Colmar Brunton poll gives National 48 percent of the Party Vote – exactly the same figure Key’s party was registering on Election Night 2014. For a party approaching the end of its third term in government, that is little short of miraculous!

 

Apart from the strategic blunder of the MoU, what else explains Labour’s failure to recover its electoral primacy? The answer is brutally simple. Unlike Don Brash in 2004-05, neither Andrew Little, nor his predecessors, have been willing to embrace the sort of policies demanded by their party’s electoral base.

 

Since 1984, no Labour leader (with the honourable exception of Jim Anderton) has unreservedly and steadfastly repudiated the ideological underpinnings of Rogernomics. A speech from Andrew Little in which he acknowledges the devastation wrought by Rogernomics, and spelling out how he proposes to right the wrongs it inflicted on working-class Kiwis, would almost certainly produce a similar galvanising effect as Brash’s 2004 speech to the Orewa Rotary Club.

 

And a much better poll.

 

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, 16 September 2016.

Red & Green Must Move Beyond Left & Right.

Sharp Focus: An alarming lack of spin-control by Labour and the Greens meant that for several days the story of their "understanding" went flapping-off in all directions – many of them extremely negative. It was only after Andrew Little had delivered his rip-roaring speech to the Greens’ AGM, and been eloquently seconded by the Green co-leader, James Shaw, that the virtues of the new relationship finally came into focus.

 

THE ANNOUNCEMENT LAST WEEK of an “understanding” between Labour and the Greens demonstrated the critical importance of spin-control. Given less than an hour’s notice that something big was in the offing, most – perhaps all – of the Parliamentary Press Gallery was left guessing.

 

Given that journalists, no less than Cabinet Ministers, hate surprises, this was remarkable. Worse still, it was the sort of behaviour that makes journalists wonder why they expend so much energy building relationships of trust and confidence with senior politicians and their spin-doctors.

 

If something big is looming, the expectation of the fourth estate is that it will be given slightly more than an hour’s warning. A little help in answering those five all-important questions – What? Who? When? Where? Why? – while not mandatory, is also appreciated.

 

The major consequence this curious deficiency in spin-control from Labour and the Greens is that for several days the story went flapping-off in all directions – many of them extremely negative. It was only on Saturday, after Andrew Little had delivered his rip-roaring speech to the Greens’ AGM, and been eloquently seconded by the Green co-leader, James Shaw, that the virtues of the Red-Green “understanding” finally came into focus.

 

Whatever the reason for Labour’s and the Greens’ initial failures in communication (and there are some intriguing explanations currently doing the rounds) the clear priority, now, is for the news media to continue debating the political meaning of this new Red-Green entente.

 

The most important question arising out of this debate is: Will the new relationship grow or shrink the combined Labour-Green Party Vote?

 

The current journalistic consensus holds that it will shrink.

 

Under the new relationship, runs this argument, the Greens can only increase their support at Labour’s expense; leaving Labour to grow its vote at the expense of National and NZ First. This strategy is unlikely to bear the required electoral fruit, however, because neither National nor NZ First voters will embrace a government-in-waiting which includes the ‘weird and wacky’, ‘Far Left’, Greens.

 

Those advancing this argument go further: insisting that not only will Labour be unable to attract the 5-10 percentage points it needs from National and NZ First if it and the Greens are to win a plurality of the Party Vote, but also that Labour’s more conservative supporters – alarmed by their party’s new relationship with the ‘weird and wacky’, ‘Far Left’, Greens – will desert Labour for the altogether more familiar fleshpots of Winston Peters and the Tories.

 

The alternative – much more optimistic – argument in favour of the new relationship takes as its starting-point an alleged majority of voters’ disquiet with the way New Zealand society is developing. This disquiet, it is claimed, extends right across the traditional political spectrum. It is fuelled by a deep concern that the nation has lost its way: that far too many New Zealanders are turning their faces from the demonstrable distress of their fellow citizens; and that unless there is an immediate and radical change of direction, then the country they grew up in, the country they love, will become unrecognisable.

 

For a change in voting behaviour on this scale to have the slightest hope of occurring, Labour and the Greens will have to convince the electorate that the 2017 election is not going to be a battle between Left and Right, but between simple human decency and self-centred social indifference.

 

The choice Labour-Green needs to be offering voters is: to start moving forward again as a nation; or, to continue the present downward slide into more inequality, more poverty.

 

Crucial to the success of this strategy will be the degree to which the Labour-Green alliance can convince the nation that it’s the Right – not the Left – who have become slaves to an ideology. Labour and the Greens must persuade voters that theirs are the policies offering practical, common-sense solutions; and that if New Zealanders want to be part of a progressive future, then they must reject the regressive policies of a ruthless, market-driven dogma that is demonstrably failing.

 

The great virtue of this argument is that it reserves for Winston Peters and his voters an honourable and influential role in the destruction of the present government, as well as in constructing the next.

 

John Key’s reign will not be ended by one party, or two. It’s going to take the whole Opposition.

 

UPDATE: Following the announcement of the Red-Green "understanding", Colmar-Brunton's pollsters registered a statistically significant shift towards Labour of approximately 5 percentage points. This additional support had, however, come at the expense of NZ First and the Greens. National's support hardly budged. It is, of course, early days, but this result suggests that the anti-Government vote is beginning to consolidate around the Labour Party, as those who had more-or-less given up on Labour ever getting its act together thankfully return to the fold. - C.T.

 

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 June 2016.

Unconvinced: Why Chris Trotter Is So Sceptical About The Labour-Green “Understanding”.

Not Now And Not This Way: The Labour and Green parties have announced their new “Understanding” far too soon; without preparing the electorate or priming the news media; without securing real and valuable gains for both partners; without carefully gauging the reaction of both their members and their voters; and without having straightforward answers to journalists’ straightforward (and entirely predictable) questions.

 

AS SO OFTEN HAPPENS when I appear on Paul Henry’s morning show, a host of lefties have devoted the rest of the day to disowning me. Underpinning their criticism is a strongly held belief that anyone billed as “left-wing” has a duty to stick up for Team Red – no matter what. Independent critical analysis is not considered helpful. Whenever someone like Paul Henry asks someone from the Left for their opinion, the only acceptable response, apparently, is: “Hooray for our side!”

 

But whatever else I may be, I am not a cheerleader. If I believe the Labour and Green parties have announced their new “Understanding” far too soon; without preparing the electorate or priming the news media; without securing real and valuable gains for both partners; without carefully gauging the reaction of both their members and their voters; and without having straightforward answers to journalists’ straightforward (and entirely predictable) questions; then I reserve the right to speak bluntly and critically about these deficiencies.

 

I further think that it is especially important to give voice to my misgivings if the deficiencies I’ve observed suggest a host of even bigger problems behind the scenes.

 

For months now there has been much discussion “inside the beltway” of Labour’s deep-seated financial difficulties. The slightest suggestion that a person might harbour left-wing sympathies has been enough to earn them a deluge of begging e-mails from Andrew Little and other Labour politicians. People make a joke of it, but those who know something about political fundraising are only too aware that these are the tactics of desperation.

 

It gets worse. Just last week the veteran political journalist, Richard Harman, writing on his “Politik” blog, suggested that Labour’s membership might now be less than the Greens. If true (and Richard is no slouch when it comes to acquiring “usually reliable” sources) that would indicate a total of, at most, 5,000. Some have gone so far as to say that if the number of affiliated trade union members is subtracted from that total, then there may actually be fewer than 2,000 paid-up ordinary members in the whole party.

 

This is the kind of information that a political analyst draws upon when confronted with an event like yesterday’s announcement. And so, because I cannot pretend to be unaware of Labour’s difficulties, I will not characterise Labour’s decision to strengthen its relationship with the Greens as anything other than a desperate concession of organisational and electoral weakness. Indeed, were I a member of the Labour Caucus, I would be demanding to read the fine print of this new “Red-Green Alliance”.

 

Even were Labour coming at this from a position of strength, I would be doubtful of its efficacy. The historian in me reacts badly when people cite the example of 1998 – when Labour and the Alliance finally decided to end their civil war. The punishment meted out to both parties by the voters in 1996 had transformed the theoretical arguments in favour of reconciliation into objective psephological fact. Both Jim Anderton and Helen Clark knew they had to respond to the wishes of their core constituencies, and they did so with tremendous theatricality. In their superbly choreographed television embrace, centre-left voters saw the beginning of the end of Jenny Shipley’s turncoat government. Clark, quoting Dickens’ A Tale of two Cities, called it “The Spring of Hope”.

 

The skill with which the coming together of Labour and the Alliance was communicated to the electorate spoke volumes about the readiness of both parties for the rigors of office. The gimcrack quality of yesterday’s (31/5/16) announcement: a hastily cobbled together presser in the old Legislative Chamber; likewise had a story to tell.

 

It is the story of an exhausted and impecunious political organisation. A party stumbling towards its 100^th anniversary in desperate need of support – any support. It is also the story of a younger and much more vital party desperate for its chance to exercise real power, and absolutely determined that it will not, once again, be robbed of its chance at the eleventh hour.

 

Such is my understanding of the Labour-Green “Understanding”.

 

Those who think they’ve witnessed a marriage made in electoral heaven – should think again.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Wednesday, 1 June 2016.