Labour and Maori: The ‘Auld Alliance’ Re-Forged.

Getting The Band Back Together: It is to be hoped that Ms Ardern understands the extent to which she and the Labour Party are indebted to the strategic insight of Andrew Little and his Chief-of-Staff, Matt McCarten, for the 2017 result.

THE FIVE DAYS allotted to Waitangi 2018 by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern can only be accounted as time well spent. Maori votes were critical to Labour being able to construct a governing coalition with NZ First and the Greens. Ms Ardern is well aware that maintaining – and if possible building on – the tangata whenua support that gave Labour a clean sweep of all seven Maori seats in 2017 will be crucial to securing her government’s re-election in 2020.

It is to be hoped that Ms Ardern understands the extent to which she and the Labour Party are indebted to the strategic insight of Andrew Little and his Chief-of-Staff, Matt McCarten, for the 2017 result.

At the core of that insight was an acceptance that Labour and the Greens, alone, would be unlikely to secure sufficient votes to govern alone, or in coalition with NZ First, unless the National Party was first stripped of as many of its potential coalition partners as possible.

The means adopted to secure that outcome were by no means universally welcomed within Labour’s ranks. In particular, the recruitment of its principal human instruments, Greg O’Connor and Willie Jackson, outraged more than a few of Labour’s social-liberals.

As a former President of the NZ Police Association, O’Connor was derided as a “fascist” by some social-liberals, and his selection for Ohariu, the seat held by the leader of the United Future Party, Peter Dunne, for 36 years, was lambasted as a sop to “Waitakere Man” – the socially-conservative element of Labour’s electoral base.

The response to the recruitment of Willie Jackson was even more vociferous. Labour’s feminists recalled the broadcaster’s role in the “Roastbusters” media controversy of 2013 and spoke out angrily against Little’s decision to more-or-less guarantee Jackson a winnable position on Labour’s Party List.

With the benefit of hindsight, however, Little’s and McCarten’s foresight is remarkable.

By positioning O’Connor in Ohariu, Labour confronted Dunne with a candidate uniquely qualified to attract the support of that electorate’s socially-conservative voters. With just the slightest swing to Labour, Dunne’s position would become untenable. Jacinda Ardern’s elevation to the Labour leadership, by delivering the required surge in Labour’s support, duly spooked Dunne into announcing his retirement from parliamentary politics.

National’s potential coalition partners were reduced by one.

Willie Jackson’s role in eliminating the next partner – the Maori Party – was pivotal. As the man appointed to run Labour’s campaign in the Maori seats, he took the leaden offer from all seven candidates to foreswear any ranking on the Party List and turned it into gold. The battle for the Maori electorate was reduced to an all-or-nothing fight to the finish between Labour the Maori Party.

How those seats were won for Labour is of crucial importance to the way Ms Ardern and her colleagues govern New Zealand.

In essence, Willie Jackson and his team ran an unabashedly class-based campaign in the Maori seats. In terms of tone and imagery, their propaganda celebrated and spoke directly to the lives and aspirations of working-class Maori families. In startling contrast to Labour’s appeal to the general electorate, the party’s message to the Maori electorate was all about working-class jobs, working-class aspirations and working-class pride.

Bearing comparison with the rhetoric of its storied past, Labour’s message to Maori voters was clear. The Maori Party has sold you out to the corporate warriors of the Iwi Leadership Group. While your whanau has been living in cars, theirs has been living high-on-the-hog at the Northern Club. While your rangatahi have struggled to find decent jobs, the children of the Maori Party’s principal benefactors (and beneficiaries!) have moved effortlessly from university to high-paying jobs in the private and public sectors. If you believe, as Labour does, that it’s time for decent, working-class Maori families to have a fair go, then you know who to vote for.

They sure did! And with those Labour votes went all hope of National securing a majority without NZ First. Little and McCarten had blown all the bridges that could possible carry the National Government to a fourth term with its preferred allies. Only Act survived Little’s and McCarten’s strategy – and Act, on its own, wasn’t enough.

Keeping those Maori votes in Labour’s column is now critical to Labour’s re-election prospects. Five days at Waitangi are, therefore, only the beginning of what’s likely to become a sort of royal progress around the marae of Aotearoa.

Ms Adern’s undoubted warmth and empathy will not, however, be enough to deliver the promised lift in Maori working-class conditions. That will require economic and social interventions as reflective of Labour’s traditions as the campaign which destroyed the Maori Party and reclaimed all seven Maori seats.

Ms Ardern’s challenge, now, is how to govern for both the Pakeha middle-class and the Maori working-class.

Serving two masters is never easy.

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 6 February 2018.

Missed Opportunities In Ikaroa-Rawhiti

There Can Be Only One: The ingredients were all there for a major political upset. Just under 60 percent of the voters of Ikaroa-Rawhiti supported somebody other than the by-election's eventual winner, Meka Whaitiri (Right). Had the voters thrown their weight behind the Mana Party candidate, Te Hamua Nikora (Second from Right) they could have sent a powerful message not only to the Maori Party (which has received the message that was sent loud and clear!) but also to the Labour Party (which, arguably, needs it the most).

 

IMAGINE A BILLIONAIRE with an interest in psephology (the academic study of elections and electoral behaviour). It’s by no means a far-fetched notion. The billionaire Koch brothers in the USA have invested millions in their quest to master the American electoral system. The billionaire currency speculator, George Soros, has similarly poured huge sums into US organisations dedicated to “getting out the vote”. So long as our leaders are elected, wealthy individuals will always have an interest in learning as much as possible about how democracy works.

 

Watching the Ikaroa-Rawhiti results come in on Saturday night, it occurred to me that with a little help from a friendly billionaire it would be possible to interview every person who participated in the by-election and ask them to explain their choice.

 

Ikaroa-Rawhiti is, of course, a Maori seat and is prone, like all Maori seats, to low voter turnout. Last Saturday’s by-election proved to be no exception, with only 10,519 of the approximately 33,000 registered electors participating in the ballot. Assuming one had the funding, 10,519 individuals is a small enough sample for a well-resourced team of professional researchers to interview in its entirety.

 

It would be a fascinating exercise. Most of us have, at one time or another, looked at an election result and scratched our heads. Why do people vote the way they do? What makes them support candidates representing parties with such a poor record of defending their interests? Why don’t more voters use their ballot strategically to secure effective representation – or simply to deliver a shock to the political system as a whole?

 

Last weekend it was within the power of the Ikaroa-Rawhiti electors to really upset New Zealand’s political apple cart. By shifting their support away from the Labour Party they could have delivered a stinging – perhaps fatal – rebuke to the Party’s lacklustre leader, David Shearer. At the very least, a rejection of Labour’s candidate would have precipitated a period of intense soul-searching within both the caucus and the wider party organisation. Labour’s entire approach to the Maori vote would have been up for review.

 

Wouldn’t that have been a more useful result for the people of Ikaroa-Rawhiti?

 

The voters of Ikaroa-Rawhiti also had the chance to deliver a sharp rejoinder to the Maori Party’s endless internal dogfighting. The leadership tussle between Dr Pita Sharples and the Waiariki MP, Te Ururoa Flavell, has weakened the Maori Party to the point where the likelihood of it retaining even the seats it holds currently is now in question. Had the electors put to one side the obvious personal qualities of the Maori Party candidate, Na Raihania (the strongest, individually, of all the contenders) and collapsed the Maori Party vote, the message to Dr Sharples and his colleagues would have been unmistakeable: “Get your act together – or this will be your fate!”

 

To be fair to the electors of Ikaroa-Rawhiti, they sort of sent a message to the Maori Party by demoting it from second-place-getter in 2011, to third-place-getter on Saturday. It was not, however, a very compelling message. Mr Raihania’s strong campaigning held his party’s vote together sufficiently well to limit his rival’s, the Mana Party’s Te Hamua Nikora’s, lead to just 500 votes.

 

Had the 2,104 Maori Party Voters, and the 1,118 electors who gave their vote to the Greens’ Marama Davidson, thrown their support behind Mr Nikora’s Mana Party, then the combined tally of votes (5,899) would’ve been more than enough to defeat the Labour candidate, Meka Whaitiri’s, winning total of 4,368.

 

Yes, they would have been taking a rather large punt on the colourful Mr Nikora, but it would only have been for 18 months. Had his performance as a Member of Parliament not been up to scratch they could easily have replaced him at the end of next year. In the meantime, the powerful messages his election would have sent – both to the Labour and Maori parties – would have benefited not just the people of Ikaroa-Rawhiti but the whole of New Zealand.

 

Sadly, that was not what happened. Rather than upset the apple cart, the electors of Ikaroa-Rawhiti (or, rather, just over a third of them) collectively kept it trundling along.

 

In electing a worthy, but pretty colourless, bureaucrat-cum-manager to represent them, Ikaroa-Rawhiti’s voters have bolstered the position of Mr Shearer and his supporters. Ms Whaitiri’s “respectable” win will allow the party to stumble on for another couple of months – or until the next disaster. By giving so many votes to Mr Raihania they have muted the message that a decisive shift of support to Mana would have sent to the Maori Party. It, too, has been permitted to stumble on.

 

So, if any public-spirited billionaires happen to read this – please get in touch.

 

We’d all benefit by discovering why democracy is so hard to master.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 2 July 2013.

Telling The Majority "Where To Get Off"

Straight From Central Casting: The millionaire Invercargill businessman and Act Party donor, Louis Crimp, has instantly become the pin-up boy of the Liberal Left's anti-racist agenda. But, loathsome though they may be, is the Left's confidence in the social and political marginality of Mr Crimp's views on Maori culture really justified? Recent local government polls on seperate Maori representation suggest otherwise. Is it possible that the bi-cultural project and democracy are essentially incompatible?

LOUIS CRIMP could have come straight from Central Casting. His narrow face, those pinched features: all the Invercargill businessman needed to complete the quintessential red-neck ensemble was a greasy pair of denim overalls and a shotgun. Certainly, his reported assertion that: “All the white New Zealanders I've spoken to don’t like the Maoris, the way they are full of crime and welfare”, fitted him out perfectly for the red-neck role.

How did New Zealand’s liberal intelligentsia respond to this “racist” eruption from the Deep South? Curiously, with considerable satisfaction. Here, in all its brutal honesty, was living proof of the Left’s fondest prejudices. In Mr Crimp they were confronted with the sum of all their cultural fears.

“But wait,” (as they say on the infomercials) “there’s more!” Not only was Mr Crimp guilty of (ahem) cultural insensitivity, but he was also a millionaire and a major donor to the Act Party. Talk about your “three-strikes” policy! Strike One: Guilty of being a redneck. Strike Two: Guilty of being a rapacious capitalist. Strike Three: Guilty of donating $125,000 to the Act Party’s election campaign. For the promoters of a bicultural, decolonised, anti-capitalist New Zealand, Mr Crimp is the political gift that keeps on giving.

But are those for whom Mr Crimp’s unapologetic expressions of racial unease constitute a weird sort of vindication genuinely representative of majority opinion in New Zealand? What if the dream of bi-culturalism, now so deeply embedded in the social policy agenda of the political class, is most emphatically not the dream of those who live outside the magic circles of elite policy formation and its unmandated bureaucratic implementation? What if, three decades of bi-cultural propaganda notwithstanding, a majority of New Zealanders continue to harbour attitudes toward Maori not all that dissimilar to Mr Crimp’s? What then?

Before answering that question, let’s see if we can find any evidence which might help us to determine whether the bi-cultural message has been accepted by a clear majority of New Zealanders; or, if it is only among Maori that the concept of a Treaty of Waitangi-based “partnership” between  coloniser and colonised continues to resonate.

On the same day as Mr Crimp’s remarks were published, the people of Nelson, in one of those curious historical coincidences, concluded a postal ballot on whether or not their city council should guarantee Maori representation around the council-table by creating a special Maori ward. According to The Nelson Mail, the voters’ answer to this bi-culturally-based question was an emphatic “No!” Of the 15,387 votes received, 3,131 were in support of the proposal, with 12,298 in opposition. The turn-out was 43 percent. At 79 percent of those participating, the result was within 1 percentage point of the findings of The Nelson Mail’s own opinion poll on the issue.

Nelson City’s response matches closely the response of voters in Waikato District who, in a similar ballot, concluding on 5 April 2012, voted 80 percent to 20 percent against separate Maori representation.

Nor is this opposition to separate Maori representation limited to provincial New Zealand. A survey of 1,031 New Zealanders conducted by Consumerlink (a department of the Colmar Brunton polling agency) found that 72.4 percent of Pakeha who answered Yes or No supported the abolition of both the Maori roll and the Maori seats, with 70.08 percent also favouring the abolition of the Waitangi Tribunal. On the question of separate Maori representation on local bodies, 73.29 percent of Pakeha voted against.

It would be quite wrong to extrapolate these figures into some sort of confirmation of Mr Crimp’s caustic assertion that most “white” New Zealanders “don’t like the Maoris”. They do, however, raise serious doubts about the actual level of support for the entire bi-cultural project. It is at least arguable that what most Pakeha New Zealanders really “don’t like” is the whole notion of Maori separatism. Were Pakeha given a choice between the present approach to race-relations, and one which advanced the principle of undifferentiated citizenship in a unitary and colour-blind state, all the evidence suggests that the latter option would win the support of more than two-thirds of the General Electorate.

In other words, the bi-cultural project cannot withstand the audit of democracy and must be imposed from above. That, at least, is the opinion of Race Relations Commissioner, Joris de Bres, who responded to the Nelson ballot by saying that the law should be changed so Maori seats are a right, rather than subject to a vote of the majority: “To put it to a general vote without a very informed electorate, I think, always runs the risk of the minority being told where to get off.” Better, presumably, for a minority to tell the majority where to get off?

Call me a red-neck if you will, but I “don’t like” that at all.

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 22 May 2012.

Dangerous Anomalies

House of Representatives? Have the seven Maori Seats become a dangerous anomaly in New Zealand's system of representative democracy?

THE LAW REQUIRES that New Zealand’s House of Representatives contain 120 seats. Thanks to the peculiarities of our electoral system it may (as it does at present) contain more than that number – but it must not contain less.

Of those 120 seats, seven are currently reserved for Maori. Only those citizens who enrol on the Maori Roll – an electoral register separate and distinct from the General Roll – may vote for candidates nominated for election in "Maori Seats".

These seven Maori Seats are without doubt a constitutional anomaly. Their existence owing a great deal more to political expediency than they do to democratic theory.

Separate Maori representation came into existence in 1867. The settler parliament saw the creation of four "native" seats as the most expedient way of getting around the fact that most Maori couldn’t meet the property qualifications of the franchise.

Colonial politicians point-blank refused to recognise the "beastly communism" of collective Maori property relations. But, with war still raging between Maori and Pakeha, the settler parliament thought it advisable to include "loyal" Maori (if only symbolically and temporarily) in the legislative process.

Had our colonial forebears been at all concerned to accord Maori political representation commensurate with their numbers, then four seats were nowhere near enough. No one knows precisely how many Maori adult males there were in 1871, but the number is unlikely to have been less than 10 percent of the total adult male population. At the very least, there should have been eight – not four – "Maori Seats" in the 78-seat chamber.

By the turn of the 19th Century, however, the Maori population had crashed. The cumulative effects of war, disease and cultural demoralisation had brought the indigenous people close to extinction. In 1900 the four seats provided for in the 1867 legislation almost certainly over-represented the Maori electorate.

But the Settler State, having extinguished indigenous military resistance, and confident that the Maori "race" was about to disappear altogether, was willing to let the anomaly of the Maori Seats linger-on a little longer.

Besides, having Maori parliamentarians could be very helpful – as when the Northern Maori MP, Hone Heke, defused the so-called "Dog-Tax War" in 1898. Having Maori MPs supporting your political party could also be very helpful in a close electoral contest. Labour was by no means the first party to build a relationship with the Maori electorates – and certainly not the last.

And so this constitutional anomaly persisted. Not even the 1985-86 Royal Commission on the Electoral System – which argued that the introduction of proportional representation would make the four Maori Seats both superfluous and unnecessary – could prise them out of New Zealand’s political culture.

It is not always wise, however, to allow anomalies to persist in the body politic. Like free radicals in the human body, constitutional anomalies have the potential to trigger potentially dangerous mutations.

Rejecting the Royal Commission’s recommendations on the Maori Seats, for example, meant that instead of the 120 seats of the House of Representatives being divided equally into 60 Electorate and 60 List Seats, the split was 65:55. By 2008 the steady increase in the number of Maori seats had exacerbated the numerical imbalance of Electorate over List Seats to 70:50. Ever-so-slowly our MMP electoral system is being transformed into the Supplementary Member system decisively rejected by the voters in 1992.

The fact that we have an "overhang" of two seats in the current House of Representatives is due to the Maori Party winning more seats than its share of the Party Vote warranted. And, a quick analysis of the voting statistics of the 2008 General Election shows that while it took 35,446 votes to elect a General MP, only 20,476 votes were needed to elect a Maori MP.

The Maori Party co-leader, Dr Pita Sharples, argues strongly that democracy is not simply a matter of "one man, one vote" – i.e. all votes being of equal value – but that it’s also about protecting the minority from the majority. That’s true, and if the Maori Seats can claim any justification – then surely this is it.

But, isn’t it equally true that no minority has the right to protect itself at the expense of the majority?

In political theory, a minority whose rights and privileges are accorded greater political weight than the majority’s has a name, it’s called – an Aristocracy.

This essay was originally published in The Timaru Herald, The Taranaki Daily News, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Evening Star of Friday, 9 April 2010.