Green Party Lesson No. 1: Anticipating The Direction Of Political Sniper Fire.

Not A Good Look: Golriz Ghahraman (then an intern for the UN's International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda) poses alongside Simon Bikindi - the Hutu singer-songwriter whose "killer songs" played a deadly role in the killing of 800,000 to one million Tutsi tribes-people during the Rwandan genocide of 1994. Ghahraman has come under intense criticism for not making clearer this, and other, associations with war criminals. That the Greens did not anticipate such attacks should be of real concern to the Ardern Government.

IN POLITICS, as in war, the aggressor’s first strike is almost always directed against the defender’s weakest point. That being the case, the National Opposition has clearly identified the Ardern Government’s lacklustre political management skills as its primary target. Their secondary target, equally clearly, is the Greens. This should be the cause of considerable angst on the Government’s part. The Labour-NZ First Coalition’s political management skills will improve with practice. Improving the Greens political skills is a much taller order!

The Greens face a number of serious problems at the moment, not the least of which is the extremely heavy workloads being borne by the most experienced members of their tiny caucus. James Shaw, Julie-Anne Genter and Eugenie Sage, as Ministers Outside of Cabinet, have their hands full just bringing themselves up-to-speed with their portfolios. Of the remaining five Green MPs: one is an Under-Secretary; one the Party Whip; another is campaigning to become the next Female Co-Leader; and the remaining two are complete newbies.

Unsurprisingly, it was one of the latter, Golriz Ghahraman, who this week found herself in the cross-hairs of David Farrar and Phil Quin, two of New Zealand’s most deadly political snipers.

Both men’s attention had been drawn to what can only be described as the unnecessary grandiloquence of Ghahraman’s CV. Describing her fairly modest role in the massive UN exercises known as the International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia and the Special Tribunal for Cambodia (ICTs) in terms that made her sound like Geoffrey Robertson and Amal Alamuddin Clooney all rolled into one, really was asking for, if not trouble, then most certainly some pretty close enemy scrutiny.

That Ghahraman was not well-placed to withstand such scrutiny, raises two obvious and important questions. Why did she draw attention to her participation in these ICTs without fully disclosing her potentially controversial roles as a member of the defendants’ legal team? And, why didn’t the Green Party carry out the same sort of due diligence exercise on Ghahraman’s CV as Quin and Farrar? At the very least, these simple precautions would have allowed Ghahraman and her Green Party colleagues to anticipate precisely the sort of attacks that eventuated.

The obvious lesson which the National Party will have drawn from this incident is that the Green Party – or at least those responsible for its communications strategies – are in the grip of a conception of politics that places far too much emphasis on marketing and spin. Only the most inexperienced (and cynical) public relations flack could consider it “okay” to leave out of a politician’s most immediately accessible biography (the one on her own party’s website!) something as potentially explosive as the information that she had helped to defend people accused of genocide and other, equally horrifying, crimes against humanity.

The incident will also have alerted National to the fact that the Greens have learned absolutely nothing from the parliamentary bullying meted-out to their colleague, the former Green MP, Keith Locke.

It was the Labour Party’s Opposition Research which dug out of the pages of Socialist Action, the Trotskyite newspaper which Locke edited for many years, a nugget of pure political gold. The Socialist Action League had been an enthusiastic early supporter of the Khmer Rouge – the revolutionary party led by Pol Pot which, in 1975, toppled the right-wing military government of Cambodia. As the editor of Socialist Action, Locke had celebrated the Khmer Rouge takeover as a “victory for humanity”.

In vain did Locke attempt to explain to his parliamentary accusers that, at the time the offending articles were written, neither he nor the Socialist Action League were aware of the wholesale “politicide” unfolding in the killing fields of Pol Pot’s Cambodia. John Pilger’s shocking revelations that the Khmer Rouge had murdered millions of Cambodians, however, rendered Locke’s after-the-fact explanations utterly ineffective. He had written in support of Pol Pot – and for many MPs that was enough to place him beyond the pale of political respectability.

The point of this cautionary tale? That a political party – especially one which, like the Greens, attracts radicals and activists of all kinds – not only needs to keep its institutional memory alive, it needs to keep it kicking-in. The most important lesson to be drawn from Locke’s experience is that political parties need to conduct exhaustive research into the backgrounds of all its candidates, so that areas of weakness and vulnerability can be identified early and, if possible, neutralised by preventive revelation.

It is supremely ironic that Ghahraman, Locke’s successor in the role of Green Spokesperson for Global Affairs, was a member of the Special Tribunal for Cambodia’s prosecution team for bringing the mass murderers of the Khmer Rouge to justice. Ironic, too, that she, like Locke, has seen her credibility in the Global Affairs and Justice Spokesperson roles severely damaged by a failure to anticipate how the Greens’ enemies, however unfairly, might turn the actions of her past, no matter how well intentioned, against her.

After Ghahraman’s ambush, Jacinda Ardern will be acutely aware that improving her government’s political management skills is not simply a matter of keeping her own Labour Party safe from political snipers, but that the job also entails teaching the Greens how to anticipate – and then dodge – their common enemy’s bullets.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 30 November 2017.

Dangerous Company: Andrew Little Quarantines The Labour Right.

Dark Horse: The ambitious Napier MP, Stuart Nash, has his own impressive connections to the power elite. This is, after all, the man who financed practically the whole of his campaign for the Napier seat with a Matthew Hooton-organised fund-raising dinner at Auckland’s exclusive Northern Club. The contrast between Nash’s fund-raising skills and those of the impoverished, Little-led Labour Party is not a flattering one.

 

ANDREW LITTLE’S DECISION to ban Stuart Nash from sharing a platform with Wellington Mayoral hopeful, Nick Leggett, is instructive. First of all, it tells us that Little and his supporters are still very frightened of the Labour Right. Though by no means a majority of either the parliamentary caucus, or the party, Labour’s right wing constitutes a large enough minority to fatally injure Labour’s re-election chances if it feels so inclined. Secondly, it tells us that Little and his supporters lack the confidence to engage the likes of Leggett (or Phil Quin, or Josie Pagani) in free and open political debate.

 

Little, with a great deal of help from his chief-of-staff, Matt McCarten, has spent the last 18 months convincing caucus members of every ideological stripe that disunity is death. They point to the way the left of the party undermined the leadership of David Shearer, and how the right of the caucus repaid them by undermining the leadership of David Cunliffe. Their contention, that such behaviour simply had to stop, was supported by all those MPs who longed to escape the impotence of Opposition – i.e. every single one of them.

 

So why, given his undoubted success in dampening-down the fractious factions of both the Labour caucus and the wider party, did Little feel obliged to lower the boom so publicly on the head of Stuart Nash?

 

Clearly the campaign team behind the Labour-endorsed candidate for the Wellington Mayoralty, Justin Lester, had a hand in his decision. They are only too aware of the political clout of the people backing Leggett’s campaign, and of the sheer volume of the money that keeps rolling in for the former Porirua Mayor. They are also rattled by Leggett’s winning ways. There is more than a little of Mike Moore’s populist style in Leggett’s political demeanour (not something you can say about Justin Lester’s). Little was goaded to action by a combination of fear and spite. Not a good look.

 

Leggett’s ready access to the networks of power, influence and money, coupled with his backers’ plan to have him share a platform with Nash, would also have reminded Little and his team of the ambitious Napier MP’s own impressive connections to the power elite. This is, after all, the man who financed practically the whole of his campaign for the Napier seat with a Matthew Hooton-organised fund-raising dinner at Auckland’s exclusive Northern Club. The contrast between Nash’s fund-raising skills and those of the impoverished Labour Party is not a flattering one.

 

In such circumstances, it is easy to see how Little and his supporters might fall prey to the notion that Nash and his kind constitute a right-wing “Labour Party-in-waiting” with all manner of helpful friends in the business community, PR circles and the news media. Friends who, given the “right” line-up on Labour’s front bench will be quick to offer all kinds of helping hands.

 

The dangerously accurate sniper-fire kept up against the Little-led Labour Party by the likes of Josie Pagani and Phil Quin (key movers, along with Leggett, in a plan to form a New Zealand-based political think tank modelled on those advising the Blairite wing of the British Labour Party) can only have contributed to the siege mentality so obviously gripping the Leader of the Opposition’s office. Particularly galling for the Labour leadership is the fact that their critics, having allowed their membership of the Labour Party to lapse, are in no way subject to its discipline. As regular guests on The Nation and Q+A, they can articulate their critique of Little’s electoral strategy with impunity.

 

The only effective way to combat the undoubted influence of Leggett, Quin, Pagani (and Nash?) within the Labour Party is to confront them head-on. If it is not possible for them to counter their opponents’ “Third Way” ideology in open debate, then Little and his team must either plead guilty to being woefully ineffectual democratic socialists, or, to secretly subscribing to exactly the same strategic objectives as the Labour Right.

 

Leggett openly proclaims his conviction that: “You have to occupy the centre, and you have to appeal to a broad base of New Zealanders, and for Labour to win they’ve got to be as big as National … They’ve got to be a 40% plus party.”

 

Frankly, it’s difficult to believe that becoming “as big as National” is not also Little’s prime electoral objective. And, if that’s correct, then the real reason for his refusal to allow Nash to share a platform with Leggett is that Little does not want the left of the party to realise that the true extent of Labour’s ambition is no greater than the goal of its unreconstructed right-wing: “to occupy the centre”.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Saturday, 13 August 2016.

The 40 Percent Solution.

Challenging The Conventional Wisdom: The Labour Right believes the party can only succeed by conforming to the prevailing political and socioeconomic orthodoxy; the Labour Left understands that the whole point of the party is to challenge and change it.

PHIL QUIN writes a mean political column. His long-standing connections to the right of the New Zealand Labour Party are extensive and strong. When he writes about politics, especially electoral politics, it is from personal experience and with considerable authority. His contribution to the Dialogue Page in this morning’s (30/7/14) NZ Herald is a case in point.

 

Under the heading “Inept Labour needs to aim higher” Quin argues strongly that “Labour’s strategists are misguided in their conviction that fewer than 30 percent of the vote is sufficient to form a viable government.” Ranging himself alongside fellow dissidents, Shane Jones and Josie Pagani, he urges Labour to “lift its sights to become a 40 percent party, capable of winning a broad spectrum of voters from all parts of the country.”

 

For a history graduate from Vic’ this is a pretty disappointing analysis. Between 1990 and 2011 Labour has managed to be a “40 percent party” only twice (2002 and 2005) and on both occasions Labour’s success owed more to the condition of the National Party than it did to its own.

 

In 2002 the National Opposition was in more-or-less total disarray and slumped to its lowest ever result of 20.9 percent of the Party Vote. Just three years later, however, National’s new leader, Don Brash, stood at the head of a no-holds-barred, far-right crusade to re-ignite the neoliberal bonfire of everything Labour voters hold dear. Unsurprisingly, its core supporters flocked to the polling-booths in pure self-defence.

 

Even with these “advantages” Labour only just made it over the 40 percent line, winning 41.2 percent in 2002 and 41.1 percent in 2005. The average level of support for Labour since 1990 is, however, much lower. In the eight general elections since that year it has won, on average, just 35 percent of the popular vote.

 

In other words, Rogernomics long ago put paid to the “40 percent party”. Labour ceased to be “a credible party capable of winning a broad spectrum of support from all parts of the country” the moment its parliamentary leadership succumbed to (in Phil’s own words) “corporate interests and right-wing politicians”. The very same people whose “fierce determination to defend the prevailing political and socioeconomic orthodoxy that shapes New Zealand’s capitalist system and delivers its beneficiaries ever-expanding wealth, power and privilege” split the party, put an end to FPP, and opened up the political space to Labour’s left for all manner of radical challengers.

 

An historian ought to know this sort of thing. Just as he ought to realise that Labour itself, by steadfastly advancing what were regarded, in the 1930s and 40s, as extremely radical policies, constructed a new social and economic order which the National Party, in order to be elected, was required to preserve intact. Labour’s social-democratic state had become “the prevailing political and socioeconomic orthodoxy”. To remain electorally competitive National had to accept the role of the “other” social-democratic party.

 

Roger Douglas’s singular achievement was to effect a transformation of the social and economic order every bit as radical as Mickey Savage’s and Peter Fraser’s – but in the opposite ideological direction. Neoliberalism was now the new orthodoxy which the leaders of both major parties, under threat of severe economic sanctions from the international financial markets, were obliged to preserve intact. So strong was the grip of the neoliberal “Washington Consensus” that even when Helen Clark was in command of a “40 percent party” she did not dare to challenge it.

 

And it is right about here in the discussion that Phil’s argument for Labour to become a “40 percent party” begins to fall apart. What he is actually saying is that, just as National in the 1950s, 60s and 70s was forced to become the “other” social-democratic party, Labour in the twenty-first century must accept the role of the “other” neoliberal party.

 

What’s more, a closer examination of the Labour Right’s constant exhortations to Labour to embrace “the centre” reveal them to be cruelly disingenuous. What Phil and his comrades are really urging Labour to do is pitch its primary appeal to those New Zealanders who are still holding their own (or even prospering) under the prevailing neoliberal regime. The people whose precarious position of privilege vis-a-vis the working poor and beneficiaries renders them unashamedly reluctant to redistribute even a little of the wealth they have “worked so hard for”. Beneath a superficial “concern” for the disadvantaged, these voters conceal a visceral contempt for the poor. They are terrified of being forced to share their resources with the “undeserving” and will have absolutely no truck with any political party which suggests that, as citizens, they have a moral obligation to put an end to inequality and poverty.

 

It was to placate these citizens that David Shearer waxed eloquent about “the beneficiary on the roof”, and why even David Cunliffe forbears from speaking out too forcefully about the lives of the poor and what Labour proposes to do to improve them.

 

Unfortunately for Phil and his ilk, Labour’s rank-and-file have no desire to become a “40 percent party” if, as part of the process, they are required to give up all hope of ever again becoming an organisation brave enough to challenge and transform the existing economic and social order.

 

The Labour Right regards this stubborn refusal to abandon principle in the name of power as evidence of utter fuckwittedness. So much so that he concludes his column with a frank call for heads to roll down at Party HQ.

 

“If Labour fails to break well into the 30s, the party president and general secretary should resign and party council members should convene urgently to consider their own positions.”

 

Back in the old Soviet Union this would have been called a purge.

 

And don’t for a moment think that Phil has forgotten the party leader.

 

“As for David Cunliffe, he should resign with grace and alacrity as soon as it becomes apparent he is unable to form a government, which might be far earlier on the evening of September 20 than any Labour voter would wish to contemplate.”

 

Clearly, the Labour Right, utterly inadequate to the task of slaying the party’s dominant left-wing faction itself, is resorting instead to demanding its collective suicide. What Phil refuses to contemplate, however, is that the Labour Left, having concluded that the long and difficult journey towards social justice might proceed more efficiently without the constant nay-saying of those unshakably committed to the “prevailing political and socioeconomic orthodoxy”, might decide to engage in a little blood-letting of their own.

 

The proposition that Labour would be much improved by losing the 40 percent of its membership who no longer believe that radical change is either possible or desirable may yet be tested.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Wednesday, 30 July 2014.