A Royal Flush: If only Andrew Little had these sort of cards to play with! Unfortunately, no matter how often he shuffles and cuts, cuts and shuffles, he's never going to deal himself a winning hand. Campaigning with the Greens, however, might just deliver the face cards Labour is lacking.
IT’S LIKE RESHUFFLING a deck of cards with all the face
cards missing. No matter how often Andrew Little shuffles and cuts, cuts and
shuffles, he’s never going to deal himself a winning hand. Labour’s failure to
develop a simple and democratic method of selecting electorate candidates and
drawing up its Party List has, finally, rendered it all but unelectable.
To become a Labour MP in 2015 one must first negotiate a
multitude of competing interest groups: Women, Maori, Unions, Youth, the
Rainbow Council. This is every bit as difficult as it sounds, with numerous
compromises and trade-offs to be made all along the way.
Getting through this labyrinth leaves Labour’s candidates
with an extremely detailed picture of the Left’s ideological landscape, but
only the sketchiest notion of the world in which 95 percent of New Zealanders
go about their daily lives.
It’s a process that also puts a lot of potentially excellent
Labour candidates off. Someone confident in their understanding of industry,
agriculture, science, or (God forbid!) running a business, rightly feels
affronted at the prospect of being figuratively pinched, poked and prodded by
people whose experience of the world is often extremely limited and narrow.
Not surprisingly, narrow and limited candidates have a head
start!
Matters are not helped, of course, when these narrow and
limited individuals – now MPs – turn against an obviously talented and
successful colleague and conspire to bring him down. Andrew Little’s demotion
of David Cunliffe – one of Labour’s most experienced politicians – represents
the unwarranted triumph of spiteful Fives and Sixes over a much-maligned King
of Hearts.
Nor is it helpful when these number cards are given royal
faces. Her regular appearances in the women’s magazines notwithstanding,
Jacinda Ardern has yet to impress as New Zealand’s Queen of Hearts. And no
matter how rapidly he is pushed up Labour’s pecking order, Kelvin Davis will
struggle to be recognised as the King of Clubs. Some chiefs may have started
out as warriors, but not all warriors become chiefs.
What, then, should Labour do? If it cannot choose candidates
with the same appeal to the voters as National’s selections. If it cannot break
its habit of penalising talent and promoting mediocrity. And, if it cannot even
persuade colleagues who have sat in Parliament for three decades that it might
be time to move aside for someone younger. How can it expect to win?
Helen Clark undoubtedly asked herself the same question in
1996. Having just led her party to its worst result since 1928 (28.19 percent)
she needed some means of lifting Labour’s numbers by at least ten percentage
points to have any chance of winning the 1999 General Election.
Three-quarters of these she secured almost immediately when
Winston Peters, against public expectations, opted to form a coalition with Jim
Bolger’s National Party. The remaining quarter came from Jim Anderton’s
Alliance, which, in one of the most generous gestures in New Zealand political
history, invited Clark to its annual conference and there agreed to give voters
the chance of ending the bitter civil war on the left of New Zealand politics
by electing a Labour-Alliance coalition government.
With Colin James’s “Poll of Polls” currently putting the
Labour Party just under 31 percent, Andrew Little faces an electoral conundrum
no less taxing than Helen Clark’s. Somehow, he has to find an additional ten
percentage points to become a credible contender for power.
The record shows that the Alliance’s embrace of its bitter
rival cost it nearly a quarter of its 1996 vote. From 10.10 percent, the
Alliance’s vote fell to just 7.74 percent. This two point drop, when combined
with the decline in the NZ First and National totals, was more than enough to
supply Labour with the ten-point boost it needed.
Will Andrew Little turn 2017 into a re-run of 1999? Will he
use the occasion of Labour’s 2016 centenary conference to invite James Shaw and
Metiria Turei to join him on the stage for a symbolic group hug? Will the three
of them then invite the New Zealand voter to bring centre-left politics into
the Twenty-First Century by electing a Labour-Green Coalition Government? The
“optics” – as the spin-doctors say – would be compelling.
And useful. Lacking Face Cards of his own, Andrew Little
could end up winning the 2017 election with a Royal Flush of Greens.
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, 4 December 2015.
