Safe Haven: David Shearer has a great deal of experience working with refugees. He knows that the last thing people fleeing from war and oppression want to encounter is divisive political ideology. Voters migrating from National to Labour are much the same - and Mr Shearer seems only too happy to oblige them by transformimng Labour into a "politics-free zone".
NATIONAL DROPS four percentage points in the latest 3
News/Reid Research poll and Labour picks up almost exactly the same amount.
What’s wrong with this picture?
Too small and too timid to go after the 800,000 New
Zealanders who did not bother to vote in the 2011 General Election, Labour’s
strategy for 2014 appears to involve transforming itself into a refugee camp
for disillusioned, disaffected, or just plain disgusted National Party voters.
David Shearer knows a great deal about refugee camps, he did,
after all, spend many years working for the United Nations. He knows, for
example, that if they’re to function properly refugee camps must steer well
clear of politics. All that people fleeing war zones and/or massive persecution
are looking for is a place of safety: somewhere they can find food, shelter and,
if they’re lucky, some semblance of human warmth and sympathy.
When former National Party voters abandon John Key’s
government for Mr Shearer’s opposition, the last thing they want, upon arrival,
is to be bombarded with radical left-wing propaganda. Ideologically-driven
policy-making is what they are fleeing. If they discover they’ve only exchanged
one bunch of gimlet-eyed apparatchiks for another, they’ll simply keep on
moving. Some will push-on to the Greens, some to NZ First, while others may
even travel as far as Colin Craig’s Conservative Party.
There is nothing homogeneous about this stream of refugees,
it contains many political tribes. Former Labour supporters – the ones who
abandoned the party in 2005 and 2008 – will be the easiest to assimilate. All Mr
Shearer has to tell them is that the party has rediscovered its respect and
admiration for their values - especially their commitment to hard work and personal
betterment. It’s an assurance that will serve equally well for the dwindling
tribe of National Party moderates. In Labour’s camp, Mr Shearer will tell them,
they’re in capable and experienced hands. Here, they’ll encounter no promises
to raise taxes or restore trade union rights. Here, their investments in the
partially-privatised state assets will remain perfectly secure. Here, they will
be safe.
And the Labour tribe itself – the people who stood loyal
right through – how will they react to their leader offering such reassuring
guarantees to turn-coats and Tories?
Some, as the 3 News/Reid Research poll indicates, will
decamp to the Greens in disgust. Others – a smaller but much more dangerous
number – will throw their support behind Mr Shearer’s rival, David Cunliffe (now
registering for the first time in the preferred prime-minister stakes). But
most, delighted by Labour’s steadily expanding claim upon the affections of the
electorate, will think only of the prospect of defeating their traditional
enemy, the National Party, and of laying low its infernally popular leader.
The option of going after National’s vote will also appeal to
Labour’s mostly middle-class membership because it involves so little genuine
political effort. No one will expect them to venture into the neighbourhoods of
the poor, where vicious dogs wait to leap at their throats and hostile Maori
and Pasifika voters ask embarrassing questions about jobs and housing and
health care for their kids and how long Labour’s MPs would last on shit wages and
inadequate welfare payments?
In their heart-of-hearts they know that to provide adequate
answers to such questions Labour would have to develop policies that would
instantly drive away all of those refugees from the Centre-Right. They know
from bitter historical experience that putting people first and money second
only earns Labour the unrelenting hostility of the mainstream media (not to
mention putting-off potentially generous business donors). It’s just so much easier
and less risky to rely on slick TV ads showing Mr Shearer playing his guitar to
delighted classrooms of healthy Pakeha children. So much less hassle to
distribute glossy, platitude-packed pamphlets in neighbourhoods where the
residents don’t bite. And so much more satisfying erecting billboards featuring
the rugged (but reliable) face of their “anti-political” leader, promising New
Zealand “A Future That Works”.
Spare some sympathy, then, for the newly-elected Policy
Council of the Labour Party: Jordan Carter, David Craig, Nigel Haworth, Leanne
Dalziel and Michael Wood. Theirs is the unenviable task of pulling together an
election platform that still has some kind of connection with the “democratic
socialist” principles to which the Labour Party still officially subscribes, but
to which the parliamentary caucus is still prepared to give its support. David
Craig, for example, has fought for years to extend the same level of state
support to mothers and children on the DPB as that extended to low-paid workers
by Working For Families. The same policy that Josie Pagani decried as
unhelpful to Labour’s candidates in 2011. Will that policy make it into Labour’s
2014 manifesto? Will any policies
likely to upset the party’s new, conservative, supporters?
The radical Marxist scholar, Slavoj Zizek, writing in the London Review of Books about the imminent
Greek elections, warns upholders of Europe’s political legacy that:
In his Notes Towards the
Definition of Culture, T.S.
Eliot remarked that there are moments when the only choice is between heresy
and non-belief – i.e., when the only way to keep a religion alive is to perform
a sectarian split. This is the position in Europe today. Only a new ‘heresy’ –
represented at this moment by Syriza – can save what is worth saving of the
European legacy: democracy, trust in people, egalitarian solidarity etc.
The sprawling political refugee camp that Labour is busily turning
itself into will find it increasingly difficult to distinguish between the “No Discussion
of Beliefs Permitted” rule it is currently enforcing in order not to upset its
National refugees, and a position which denies the importance of espousing coherent
political beliefs altogether. Such a Labour Party, by extirpating the “heresy” of genuine
social-democratic thought and allowing itself to become a safe haven for an
ideologically inert and politically demobilised population could, paradoxically,
win election after election.
But what would be the point? And who would notice the difference?
This posting is exclusive
to the Bowalley Road blogsite.
