Act’s Precarious Ascendancy.

On The Lookout: It is easy to imagine how closely Seymour has been watching the National Opposition for the slightest sign of a Clark figure emerging. A respected politician, who enjoys broad support across the party and, much more importantly, who impresses the ordinary centre-right voter as having what it takes to be an effective Prime Minister. From Seymour’s perspective, Judith Collins was the perfect Opposition Leader – for Act.

THE PROBLEM which the Act Party faces for the next two years, is the same problem that plagued the Alliance. Jim Anderton’s coalition of anti-establishment parties thrived while the official Opposition, Labour, languished. But, for every percentage point Labour recovered in the opinion polls, the Alliance was forced to contemplate the deflation of its political hopes and dreams. Now that National stands poised to elect a new leader, Act’s own leader, David Seymour, will be praying that he or she proves to be no better than the last.

The only glimmer of hope for Act, and Seymour, is that National’s fractured caucus currently contains no one even remotely like Helen Clark.

The Alliance’s fortunes were never more promising than when the Labour Party was led by Mike Moore. For all his undoubted strengths as a politician, Moore’s inescapable weakness was that he was part of the cabal of Labour politicians responsible for what came to be known as “Rogernomics”.

The famous photograph of Roger Douglas, Michael Bassett, David Lange and Moore guiltily enjoying a feed of fish-and-chips following their first (unsuccessful) attempt to roll Bill Rowling, was to haunt Moore for the rest of his life. For those many thousands of former Labour voters who experienced Rogernomics as an unforgiveable betrayal, Moore would always be one of the “Fish-and-Chip Brigade”. It made him Jim Anderton’s best recruiting sergeant.

Helen Clark was a different story altogether. Among those who knew her (and that was pretty much every Labour Party activist of the 1980s) Clark was never going to be condemned as a “Rogernome”. By the same token, she was determined not to be branded an “Andertonista”. The title she relished, and never ceased to cultivate, was “pragmatist”. In practical terms, that meant Clark was willing to be a good social-democrat, if possible; and a reluctant custodian of Roger Douglas’s legacy, if necessary. It was a fine, but vital, distinction. It made her what Anderton never managed to be – prime-ministerial.

It is easy to imagine how closely Seymour has been watching the National Opposition for the slightest sign of a Clark figure emerging. A respected politician, who enjoys broad support across the party and, much more importantly, who impresses the ordinary centre-right voter as having what it takes to be an effective Prime Minister. From Seymour’s perspective, Judith Collins was the perfect Opposition Leader – for Act. How fervently he must be praying that her successor turns out to be as big a liability. Because Seymour knows that if National’s caucus chooses wisely, then Act’s poll numbers will tumble and its electoral support crumble.

That is, of course, a very big “if”. Since 2018, all of National’s choices have gone awry. Even so, someone must be chosen to lead the party. Who?

His sterling efforts at re-branding himself, notwithstanding, former leader (and off-colour jokester) Simon Bridges still fails to impress. Frankly, the man’s a puzzle. Pre-Covid, Bridges was handsomely repaying his colleagues’ confidence with positive poll results. Why, then, did the public never take to him? Perhaps, as Bridges’ autobiography suggests, his perception of himself as an outsider was simply too strong to hide.

Helen Clark never doubted that she was Labour through-and-through. Bridges, however, seems convinced that he’ll never cut the mustard as a “genuine” Nat: never be welcomed as “One of Us” by the Tory toffs. Entrenched racism? Class prejudice? Whatever the explanation, Bridges appears to suffer badly from the “Imposter Syndrome”. The problem being that, in politics, if you don’t believe in yourself, then neither will anybody else.

What about Christopher Luxon? Does he cut the mustard? Until Judith Collins’ self-immolation, the answer to that question was: “Not quite yet.” Parliamentary politics, Luxon’s backers argued, cannot be comprehensively mastered in the space of a year. Better to wait for the politics of the situation to “mature”. Well, the Collins vintage has “matured” alright – and National’s caucus has the shattered wine bottles to prove it. Ready, or not, Mr Luxon has a “tide in the affairs of men” to catch.

Then again, it’s always possible that we are all looking at – but not seeing – the person fated to relegate Seymour to the Reserves Bench. After all, how many people saw the young MP for Mt Albert as a future Prime Minister? And, isn’t that Act’s worst nightmare? National’s very own “Jacinda”?

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 26 November 2021.

Messages Received: Mark McGowan's Landslide in WA Makes Jacinda's Win Look Modest.

A Crushing Victory: On Election Night in Perth, Western Australia, the provisional count gave Mark McGowan's Labor Party an impressive 60 percent of the popular vote. The Liberal’s received just 21.6 percent.

IF YOU THOUGHT Jacinda Ardern had a good election in 2020, just take a look at Mark McGowan’s landslide. Last Saturday, 13 March 2021, the West Australian elections saw McGowan’s Labor government win 51 seats in the 59-seat Legislative Assembly. The Liberal Party, including its young leader, Zak Kirkup, suffered an unprecedented electoral catastrophe. The Party was reduced to just 2 assembly seats, and Kirkup was defeated in his own electorate, Dawseville, by Labor’s Lisa Munday. So decisive was Labor’s victory that the ABC was able to call the result a mere 42 minutes after the polls closed.

The emphatic nature of McGowan’s win was attributed by all reputable political journalists and commentators to his handling of the Covid-19 Pandemic. With fewer than 1,000 cases and just 9 deaths recorded across the state, the Premier there, like the Prime Minister here, was rewarded with an astonishing surge of support from across the political spectrum. Prior to election day, the polls predicted catastrophe. Labor was shown nudging 70 percent. McGowan’s approval rating was a stratospheric 88 percent!

In the face of Labor’s looming electoral tsunami, the Liberals simply lost it. Sixteen weeks out from the election they chose as their new Opposition Leader an ambitious 34-year-old policy analyst. (The card he pressed into the hand of former Liberal Leader, John Howard, while still a teenager, read simply: “Zak Kirkup, Future Prime Minister”.)

Just 16 days out from polling day, in an unforgivable display of political honesty, Kirkup conceded to startled journalists that there was no way his party could win the election. As if this wasn’t enough a big enough incentive for traditional Liberal voters to desert their party, Kirkup’s Finance Spokesperson presided over a complete train-wreck of a media conference called to mark the release of the party’s economic policy. This anorexically-thin document turned out to contain almost no reliable information as to how its contents would be funded.

On the night, the provisional count gave Labor an impressive 60 percent of the popular vote. The Liberal’s received just 21.6 percent.

The Western Australian Liberal Party’s stunning defeat is reminiscent of the equally disastrous performance of the Canadian Progressive Conservative Party (I know, I know, it’s an oxymoronic name!) in the General Election of 1993.

Over the course of the previous nine years, the PCP Prime Minister, Brian Mulroney, had ruthlessly imposed a hard-core programme of neoliberal “reform” upon the Canadian people. Their response was to slash the PCP’s share of the popular vote from a very respectable 43 percent in 1988, to a terminal 16 percent in 1993.

Under Canada’s first-past-the-post electoral system the result was a death sentence. From 169 seats in Canada’s House of Commons, the PCP was reduced to just two. Within a few years the PCP was swallowed up by a new right-wing coalition and disappeared from Canadian history forever. Mulroney, himself, only escaped utter humiliation by stepping away from the PCP’s leadership before the electoral axe fell.

It is interesting to speculate what might have happened to the New Zealand Labour Party in the general election of 1990 had its caucus not had the wit, just eight weeks before polling day, to hand over leadership of the party to working-class battler Mike Moore.

Prior to the departure of Moore’s prime ministerial predecessor, the professorial Geoffrey Palmer, internal party polling showed Labour heading for an unsurvivable result in the mid-to-high teens. Had not the Deputy-PM, Helen Clark, and Moore prevailed upon Palmer to step down, Labour may well have anticipated the PCP’s fate by three years by winning only three or four seats in the House of Representatives. As things turned out, however, Moore was able to do what Kirkup couldn’t: “save the furniture”. Labour’s vote in 1990 was an eminently survivable 35 percent of the popular vote.

Had it not been for New Zealanders voting for the Mixed Member Proportional electoral system in 1993, the New Zealand National Party may have suffered a disaster very similar to the WA Liberals in 2002. Under the old First-Past-the-Post electoral system, Bill English’s record low 2002 result of 20.9 percent would, similarly, have slashed the National Party’s parliamentary representation to low single figures. By the same token, a popular vote of 50 percent under FPP would have delivered Labour a huge parliamentary majority.

The existence of MMP renders a debacle of West Australian proportions most unlikely. The voters know that the death-zone for unpopular parties is 5 percent not 20 percent. In sharp contrast to the much smaller NZ First, there’s a lot of ruin in a political party the size of National. Even so, Judith Collins cannot afford to let her party languish in the mid-to-high 20s indefinitely. As she, herself, noted, only a few years ago, the National leader who allows its Party Vote to fall below 35 percent should not anticipate a lengthy tenure in the top job.

The Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, is no doubt also taking stock of where she and her party stand currently. The latest TV1-Colmar Brunton shows Labour’s level of support pretty much unchanged from Election Night, but her own unprecedently high ranking in the preferred-prime-minister stakes has taken a tumble. (Although, even after shedding 15 percentage points, that still puts Jacinda 35 points ahead of her nearest rival!)

In both instances, Covid-19 continues to call the shots. While the country as a whole still relishes its good fortune vis-à-vis a Covid-raged world; the yo-yoing in and out of Lockdown has left many voters in a grumpy frame of mind. Clearly, Jacinda is being told that, good though she undoubtedly is, she has done – and could do – better.

Zak Kirkup would tell her that there are much worse messages an electorate can send you. While Covid-19 continues going to and fro on the earth, and walking up and down in it, Jacinda should not expect to receive the sort of judgement pronounced upon the West Australian Liberals. When the Coronavirus is finally defeated, however, Jacinda will need to find new evils to vanquish, and with an equal measure of success, or she, too, will pay the inevitable electoral price of failure.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 19 March 2021.

Jacinda 2.0 is "Licenced To Govern" - But Not By, Or For, Us.

Government By Permission:  That phrase: “a licence to govern” brings into sharp focus so much which has been unclear to the tens-of-thousands of New Zealanders who voted Labour-Green in confident expectation of ushering-in a period of much-needed, but long-delayed, change. It explains why – in spite of her outstanding communication skills and empathy – Jacinda Ardern finds it impossible to follow the examples of Mickey Savage and Norman Kirk. 

WHAT HAS HAPPENED to Jacinda Ardern? What has become of the woman who promised to “transform” New Zealand through the “Politics of Kindness”? Where is the woman who forged a team of five million and coached it through the Covid-19 pandemic? Why is the woman who won 50.1 percent of the Party Vote refusing to respond to the needs of the poorest New Zealanders. What in the Blue Blazers is going on?

Contrast the present Labour Government’s refusal to give the poor a happy Christmas with this little vignette from Labour’s past.

“Shortly after his election as Labour Party leader in 1961, Arnold Nordmeyer was asked by the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation to recall for its listeners ‘My Most Memorable Christmas’. He spoke movingly of the first Labour Government’s decision, in December 1935, to advance the equivalent of an extra week’s relief payment to all the unemployed as a “Christmas Bonus”. That single act of state generosity, he said, sent ripples of hope and goodwill through thousands of destitute families and hundreds of cash-strapped communities. By Christmas, its effects were evident across the whole of New Zealand.”

Alternatively, there’s the extraordinary interview conducted by David Frost with New Zealand’s newly-elected Prime Minister, Norman Kirk, early in 1973. About 3 minutes into the interview Kirk talks about the letter he received from a disabled woman, thanking him for the special Christmas payment he made to all social welfare beneficiaries in December of 1972, and telling him what the extra money had made possible. Here’s the link. 

Jacinda Ardern is rightly celebrated for her communication skills and for her demonstrations of empathy, but set her performances alongside Kirk’s in that interview and the huge gulf that separates the current Labour Government from its predecessor of 1972-75 is immediately apparent. Yes, the world has become a very different place, and the conduct of centre-left politics has changed dramatically. But human compassion and political authenticity are just as easy to spot in 2020 as they were in 1973. Something has been removed from our political leaders, something important. What is it? And who took it?

The answer – appropriately enough – lies in the turbulent history of the 1970s. At the heart of that history was Capitalism’s ruthless fightback against what its intellectual leaders regarded as the unwarranted, and increasingly uncontrollable, inflation of democratic expectations.

Capitalism’s problem, in a nutshell, was that too many people wanted – and were demanding – too much. Across the industrialised West, decade after decade of rising prosperity had freed ordinary people, especially young people, from the relentless pursuit of bread and butter. Having secured their freedom from raw material deprivation, people were seeking the freedom to become something more than an employee, more than a consumer. Working-class men; women of all classes; people of colour; gays and lesbians: all of these groups were demanding the right to be considered – and to become – fully human.

Nowhere is this phenomenon better described than in Ariel Dorfman’s seminal book on cultural imperialism – The Empire’s Old Clothes. In the first chapter of the book, Dorfman recalls being approached by a young woman from one of the shanty-towns that encircled Chile’s capital city, Santiago. Professor Dorfman, and some of his students, had come to help the shanty-dwellers repair the damage wrought by a recent flood.

“She came up to me and asked quite frankly if it was true that I thought people shouldn’t read photo-novels”, Dorfman writes – alluding to his crusade against the “industrial products of fiction.” Comics, soap operas, westerns, radio and TV sitcoms, love songs, films of violence: “you name it”, quipped Dorfman, “I had it under scrutiny.”

“So I stopped digging and answered her. It was true. I thought that photo-novels were a hazard to her health and her future.*

“She did not seem to feel any special need for purification. ‘Don’t do that to us, companerito,’ she said in a familiar, almost tender way. ‘Don’t take my dreams away from me.”

A few years later, about the same time David Frost was interviewing Norman Kirk, Dorfman was in the same shanty-town for the opening of a new community centre – one of the many thousands of collective initiatives funded by the socialist government of Salvador Allende – when he encountered the same woman:

“I didn’t recognize her at first, but she remembered me. She came up to me, just like that, and announced that I was right, that she didn’t read ‘trash’ anymore. Then she added a phrase which still haunts me. ‘Now, companero, we are dreaming reality.’”

For nearly 50 years now, this is the dream/nightmare that has driven the politics of the Capitalist West. How to prevent ordinary people from making their dreams real through collective action. Certainly, it is no accident that the “cure” for too many dreams began in Chile. After the USA had “made the economy scream”, and General Augusto Pinochet’s troops had gunned down Salvador Allende in his Presidential Palace, it was to Chile that the “Chicago Boys” – the followers of Milton Friedman – came to show the world how Capitalism could be kept safe from Democracy.

And the “lessons” from Chicago just kept coming. Across the Tasman, Labor Prime Minister Gough Whitlam’s government was deposed in a bloodless coup by his own Governor-General (and CIA asset) Sir John Kerr. Fortunately for ordinary New Zealanders, Norman Kirk’s untimely (and extremely convenient) demise in August 1974 obviated the need for such a dramatic intervention here. (Although the CIA did help out the National Party by facilitating the production of some killer campaign ads for the 1975 general election.) Then, of course, there was the plot to topple UK Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson in 1976, and the final coup de grace against the very possibility of democratic socialism – the capital strike against the French socialist government of President Francois Mitterrand in 1981. If the Left ever wanted to govern again, then it would have to lower its sights – and its red flags.

Back in the 1980s, there was a story, probably apocryphal, about Mike Moore and the powerful Australian television series The Dismissal – which dramatized the sacking of Gough Whitlam’s Labor Government in 1975. According to the story, Moore was determined to remind his colleagues about the dangers that lay in wait for Labour governments.

What Moore wanted his colleagues to appreciate was the overwhelming power that could be brought to bear against a government that threatened the interests of the people who really mattered. How vital it was to keep business on your side. How much damage the news media could inflict upon a political leader it didn’t like. How dangerous senior public servants could be if their ministers refused to accept official advice. Most importantly, he wanted to remind them of the risks posed to labour governments by stubborn idealists: politicians who refused to be guided by principled pragmatism and common sense. So Moore sat all his caucus colleagues down and made them watch every one of The Dismissal’s six, hour-long, episodes.

Was Moore on to something? Had he drawn the correct lessons from the fall of so many democratic socialist politicians and governments? More importantly, had other centre-left politicians, in other countries, reached exactly the same conclusion? Is that why the world ended up with Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Gerhard Schroeder, Francois Hollande, Helen Clark and Kevin Rudd? Or, turning the question around, is that why the campaigns of genuine leftists like Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders so consistently come to grief?

The beginnings of an answer may be found in the following passage, taken from a speech delivered to the prestigious Wellington Club on 3 November 2020 by the veteran political journalist, Colin James:

“With National weak, Jacinda Ardern has political space to push real reform. Will she? Can she? Will Grant Robertson? Can he?

“Grant Robertson has stuck to fiscal and monetary orthodoxy. Jacinda Ardern told me back in 2018 that earns Labour a ‘licence to govern’, that is, tolerance by business and other sceptics. That is a clue to their cautious mentality.”

A clue, says James. Surely it’s something a little more definitive than that? A key, perhaps? Yes, a key.

That phrase: “a licence to govern” brings into sharp focus so much which has been unclear to the tens-of-thousands of New Zealanders who voted Labour-Green in confident expectation of ushering-in a period of much-needed, but long-delayed, change. It explains why – in spite of her outstanding communication skills and empathy – Jacinda Ardern finds it impossible to follow the examples of Mickey Savage and Norman Kirk. Those leaders believed the only “licence” a party needed to govern was the one given to them by the voters in a general election. Forty-eight years on from the Labour landslide of 1972; forty-eight years after that young shanty-dweller proudly informed Ariel Dorfman that she and her comrades were “dreaming reality”; Jacinda Ardern knows better. To drive a capitalist economy, it is first necessary to obtain a licence – from the capitalists.

But, securing the “tolerance of business and other sceptics” is not an easy thing to do. There are so many self-denying ordinances one has to offer-up: no capital gains tax; no wealth tax; no return to universal union membership; no restoration of the unconstrained right to strike; nothing to empower or embolden that reserve army of labour we call beneficiaries; nothing that might upset the business community, dairy farmers, or the fishing industry; and certainly nothing to combat climate change which in any way threatens the capitalists’ sacred right to make a profit. Nothing, in short, that could possibly upset the status-quo.

The most frustrating aspect of Jacinda’s “licence to govern” proposition is that in both historical and practical political terms she is, almost certainly, correct.

It is important to remember that both Ardern and Robertson were working in the Beehive during Helen Clark’s first term as Prime Minister. They would have heard the stories about the grim “Winter of Discontent” that followed the creation of the Labour-Alliance coalition government in the early summer of 1999. How the New Zealand capitalist class threatened to “put away their cheque-books” if there was even the slightest hint that some of the Alliance’s left-wing policies were about to be enacted. How the Finance Minister, Michael Cullen, had to abase himself before the nation’s “business leaders” at the Auckland Club. How Helen Clark felt obliged to swear that Laila Harré’s employer-funded child-care would only be introduced “over my dead body”.

The old Marxists may rail against Ardern’s and Labour’s “incrementalism” but when challenged to come up with an alternative strategy for operating safely under neoliberal capitalism, the system which, for nearly fifty years, has decreed anything more ambitious than piecemeal and largely inconsequential legislation verboten, they generally mutter something about “revolutionary action” and head for the bar.

They’re right, of course. Neoliberal Capitalism, by declaring democratic socialism and social-democracy out-of-bounds in the 1970s and 80s has, wittingly or unwittingly, left revolution as the only viable option. Not only when it comes to once again making it possible for the wretched of the earth to “dream reality”; but also when it comes to rescuing the only planet we know of in the entire universe where ordinary people’s dreams of becoming truly free and fully human can be realised.

* It would be interesting to know what Ariel Dorfman (who is still alive) makes of the sort of communications hardware and software that has become ubiquitous in twenty-first century societies. So much more powerful and compelling than the photo-novels and comics of the 1960s and 70s, our PCs, lap-tops, tablets and cellphones have made the corporations who manufacture and control them masters of the planet. The “industrial production of fiction” which Dorfman complained of back then seems quaint when compared to the scale of contemporary cultural imperialism’s reach and power. That capitalism has placed a portal to its material and imaginative production in virtually every hand on the planet should give us pause. Perhaps, like the young shanty-dweller, we will only be able to start “dreaming reality” when we throw the masters’ “trash” away?

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 13 November 2020.

A Different Kind Of Populism.

Consider The Counterfactual: What if, instead of Jim Anderton and the Alliance; someone and something very different had emerged from the wreckage of the New Zealand labour movement at the end of the 1980s? A left-wing populist leader: whose trade union background positioned him as the natural foe of the Business Roundtable and all its political hangers-on; but whose staunchly-held and deeply conservative views on social and environmental issues made him persona non grata on the progressive left.

NEW ZEALAND GOT POPULISM early. If you count Rob Muldoon as this country’s first no-holds-barred populist, then the start-date is 1974. If, as most people do, you date the rise of populism in New Zealand from the advent of the NZ First Party in 1993, then our populist-in-chief is Winston Peters – and he’s been kicking around for a quarter-century.

Compared to some of the nastier populist beasts prowling around western democracies these days, Winston scrubs-up pretty well. Oh sure, he’s been known to play the race card from time-to-time, and we wince at his “Two Wongs don’t make a white” “jokes”. But NZ First and its leader have given us no Charlottesvilles; his followers don’t wear uniforms or carry Tiki-Torches. Rob Muldoon was by far the more terrifying populist of the two. When Winston flashes us that 1,000 Watt grin of his, pretty much all is forgiven.

At heart, Winston is a National Party politician of the old school. He was raised under the gentle rule of Keith Holyoake, when the “historic compromise” between capital and labour: born of the Great Depression and World War II; was in full swing. Like Muldoon, Winston was fervent believer in the “property-owning democracy” that New Zealand had grown into as a result of that compromise.

No more than his pugnacious mentor, was Winston willing to surrender the New Zealand that Labour built, and National managed, to the tender mercies of the ideologues in Treasury and the Business Round Table. NZ First’s posture of resistance towards the policies of the so-called “free market” (policies to which both Labour and National insisted there was no alternative) proved to be a particularly durable political stance. Winston’s vision of what their country once was – and could be again – is shared by many thousands of New Zealanders.

Why then did Jim Anderton’s Alliance fail? It’s a question often asked by those who place themselves on the left of the political spectrum. After all, Anderton had also believed in the social-democratic New Zealand laid low by Roger Douglas and Ruth Richardson. What’s more, he and the Alliance had a much more fully-developed programme to restore it than NZ First had ever bothered to offer the electorate.

The Alliance’s problem – and, therefore, Jim’s problem – was that its most effective constituent parties, the NewLabour Party and the Greens, saw themselves as radically progressive political and social movements, and the Alliance itself as a vehicle for carrying New Zealand well beyond the timid compromises of the immediate post-war era. This was not what Jim wanted, but having placed himself at the head of the Labour Left, he had no choice but to follow along, muttering, behind his younger, much more radical, comrades.

The terrorist attack of 9/11 and the subsequent US assault on Al Qaida’s Afghan hosts – which Jim Anderton instinctively supported and which his anti-war baby-boom comrades just as instinctively opposed – was what brought the Alliance down. Jim and his Progressive Party limped along for another six years – and then it was over.

But, what if, instead of Jim Anderton; instead of the Alliance; someone and something very different had emerged from the wreckage of the New Zealand labour movement at the end of the 1980s? A left-wing populist leader: whose trade union background positioned him as the natural foe of the Business Roundtable and all its political hangers-on; but whose staunchly-held and deeply conservative views on social and environmental issues made him persona non grata on the progressive left. Someone with Mike Moore’s impeccable working-class credentials but lacking the enormous chip that Mike always carried on his shoulder. Someone who, unlike Moore, had refused to drink the neoliberal Kool-Aid, but who possessed every bit of Mike’s cut-through political wit – and then some.

Had a leader like that emerged to break the working-class out of the economically and socially liberal corral into which its largely middle-class parliamentary leadership had penned it, then the shape of twenty-first century politics in New Zealand could have been very different.

Under MMP, an economically radical but socially conservative “Justice Party”, led by the sort of leader described above, would have been able to clear the 5 percent threshold without difficulty. An advocate of state ownership and intervention; a supporter of both trade unionism and trade protectionism; strong on law and order; sceptical of welfare’s enduring utility; unconvinced by feminism, biculturalism and environmentalism; scornful of gay rights; and openly hostile towards multiculturalism and the multi-ethnic immigration it sanctioned; such a party would have separated Labour from a strategically significant chunk of its electoral base and turned NZ First into a National-supporting country party. Among white, working-class males it would have been huge.

Could such a party still emerge to challenge the socially-liberal Left? Not while the economy keeps ticking away. Not while Jacinda’s stardust continues to dazzle the voters. But, if History teaches us anything, it’s that the ingredients for disaster are never far from the reach of those who believe that crisis and opportunity go together like gasoline and open flames.

Cometh the hour, cometh the man with the comb-over.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 13 September 2018.

"Fear No Ghosts!": Little, Labour And The TPPA.

Crucial Intervention: Helen Clark's highly controversial endorsement of the TPPA struck the anti-TPPA movement like a torpedo amidships and left it dead in the water. It is now rumoured that another former Labour PM, Mike Moore, will lend his not inconsiderable advocacy skills to the promotion of the TPPA

 

ANDREW LITTLE has failed to make Labour’s response to the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) a “leadership issue”. It’s a failure that threatens not only Mr Little’s credibility, but also that of the Labour Party itself. As matters relating to the TPPA unfold over the next few weeks, it will become increasingly clear that much more is at stake here than a trade agreement.

 

In part, Labour’s stance on the TPPA has become a matter of protecting legacies. Labour’s embrace of free markets in the mid-1980s necessarily embraced the dogma of free trade. The 1999-2008 Labour Government’s success in negotiating the China-NZ Free Trade Agreement (China’s first with a recognisably “Western” government) is held up as its most important achievement. Certainly, Helen Clark regards the China-NZ agreement as the jewel in the crown of her political legacy.

 

Just how important Labour’s free trade stance is to Ms Clark became clear on 1 October 2015, in New York, when she stood alongside the National Prime Minister, John Key, and joined him in singing the praises of the TPPA. This endorsement by Ms Clark struck the anti-TPPA movement like a torpedo amidships, leaving it dead in the water.

 

Few New Zealanders grasped the significance of Ms Clark’s intervention. As a senior United Nations’ official, she is bound by the strictest protocols from intervening in the slightest way in the domestic politics of a member state. That she was willing to run the risk of being accused of breaching that protocol speaks volumes about how much personal and political capital she has invested in Labour’s continued adherence to free trade policies.

 

If Ms Clark fails in her attempt to become the United Nation’s first woman Secretary General, her intervention in New Zealand’s domestic TPPA debate may well turn out to be one of the deciding factors.

 

It is possible that Ms Clark may not be the only former Labour Prime Minister to enter into the TPPA debate. Rumours are rife that Mike Moore – indisputably New Zealand’s most fervent free-trade champion – is intending, his health permitting, to stump the country in favour of the TPPA. If the rumours prove to be true, then the anti-TPPA campaigners will be faced with a doughty opponent: Mr Moore’s promotional skills are legendary.

 

Ms Clark’s and Mr Moore’s determination to uphold Labour’s free-trade legacy will find ready allies in Labour’s parliamentary caucus. Phil Goff was this country’s leading FTA negotiator with the Chinese and he will not abandon his legacy without a fight. At his side he will likely count Annette King, Trevor Mallard, Clayton Cosgrove and David Shearer. These are not the sort of politicians a Labour leader alienates without consequences – just ask David Cunliffe!

 

It should be clear, from the above, that even if Mr Little does harbour doubts about the wisdom of supporting the TPPA (and that is by no means certain) he faces some pretty daunting obstacles when it comes to expressing them. He and his team of advisers have made a political fetish out of presenting a unified team to the electorate. An open and, in all likelihood, vituperative debate about the merits of opposing the TPPA runs the risk of reopening a multitude of old wounds. If disunity is death, then courting disunity must surely be political suicide?

 

On the other side of the debate stand those within the Labour caucus and throughout the wider party who regard the TPPA as something much more sinister than a simple trade agreement. In particular, the Investor/State Dispute Settlement Process (ISDP) contained in the agreement is seen by many New Zealanders as a mechanism for preventing the TPPA signatories from introducing economic and social measures inimical to the interests of the large, transnational corporations the TPPA appears to have been set up to serve. Not to put too fine a point upon it: the purpose of ISDP is to prevent Labour-type political parties from ever again behaving like Labour-type political parties.

 

The compromise position Mr Little has thrashed out with his colleagues is to reassure the electorate that a Labour-led government would “defy” the TPPA by passing legislation strictly regulating the circumstances in which New Zealand land may be sold to foreigners. Quite why the caucus has agreed to this we can only speculate, especially when a TPPA exemption to the same effect (which Australia, Malaysia and Singapore have already secured) is, apparently, ours for the asking.

 

The faux radicalism offered up by Mr Little and his colleagues on the question of foreign ownership in no way addresses the profound issues arising out of the TPPA’s imminent ratification  – nor is it likely to appease Labour’s critics.

 

At the site of an earlier rebel army’s defeat, Mao Zedong told his faltering troops to: “Fear no ghosts! The past does not return!”

 

Andrew Little should do the same.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 12 January 2016.