All Smiles Now: Claire Szabo is taking up her presidential role after serving as the CEO of Habitat For Humanity. Which is absolutely perfect! After KiwiBuild was so comprehensively mismanaged by Phil Twyford, the party has not only elected a new president from a thoroughly respectable not-for-profit, but one who has also actually managed to get real “affordable houses” built!
THIRTY YEARS AFTER he quit the party in disgust, a man calledMark has re-joined Labour. That’s remarkable. It’s also a tribute to the power
of Jacinda Ardern, and to the strength of the hopes she has kindled. People who
once wanted nothing more to do with Labour are returning to the fold. The
Coalition Government’s failure to deliver on child poverty, affordable housing
and a more equitable tax system has not disillusioned them. They are standing
firm: willing Jacinda to succeed. Willing to cut her enough slack to secure a
second term.
What remains to be seen is whether the Labour Party – thirty
years on from 1989 – can fulfil the expectations of Jacinda’s hopeful recruits.
After reading “Politik” editor Richard Harman’s report of the party’s annual
conference, I’m doubtful. This is how he began:
“For over 30 years the Labour Party could have only dreamed
of the conference it has just held. Labour has finally found its happy space;
devoid of factional rivalries; bitter personality feuds or fundamental
challenges from the party activists to the Parliamentary wing. Delegates who
were there for the fights of the 80s or even more recently the Cunliffe
challenge in 2012, were left reminiscing about the bad old days. Otherwise, the
400 or so who attended spent the weekend basking in the Whanganui sun and
cheering and applauding their leadership with considerable enthusiasm. This was
not the Labour Party we once knew.”
Harman has a gift for understatement! The entity he
describes isn’t merely a far cry from “the Labour Party we once knew”, it
barely qualifies as a political party at all! It certainly has nothing at all
in common with the inveterately quarrelsome and rambunctious political movement
that, for more than a century, accommodated the overwhelming majority of the
New Zealand Left. A progressive party without factional rivalries, personality
feuds, or party activists hankering to challenge the Parliamentary wing has
lost every defining characteristic of a living left-wing movement.
Nowhere was this lack of living political sentiment more
evident than in the election of Claire Szabo. The 300-400 delegates assembled
at Whanganui (a number well down on previous conferences) opted to elect not a
party president but a curriculum vitae. Indeed, it would be difficult to
come up with a more perfect example of the modern political professional.
Szabo’s first interview with the news media struck Radio New Zealand’s Kim Hill
as “a string of platitudes”. She was being kind.
The presidential election result did, however, serve to clarify
what the Labour Party no longer sees itself as representing. Szabo’s principal
challenger for the party presidency was Tane Phillips, a working-class Maori
battler and trade union leader from Kawerau. It was people like Phillips who
reclaimed every last one of the Maori seats for Labour in 2017. Their highly
effective campaign (which drove the Maori Party from Parliament) spoke not to
the Maori middle-class, but to the strong working-class communities in which
most urban Maori still live. That sort of success would have been enough to get
the Secretary of the Pulp & Paper Workers Union elected president in the
old Labour Party – but not Jacinda’s new one.
Jacinda’s Labour Party would have had a pink fit if a woman
of Szabo’s outstanding professional credentials failed to head-off a burly
trade unionist. Certainly, all the bright young things currently polishing
their own CVs would struggle to understand what sort of outfit they’d signed up
to if degrees from Trinity College, Dublin and Harvard Business School could be
outclassed by qualifications from the School of Hard Knocks!
Not that such an upset was ever on the cards. Well, not on
the 56 E-Tu Union card votes carried around by the Labour affiliates’
superannuated bag-man, Paul Tollich, anyway. For more than three decades the
combined votes of the Affiliates and the Women’s Council has dictated the
outcome of annual conference ballots. Maybe, if the blue-collar Pulp &
Paper Workers had affiliated themselves to the party, then things could have
turned out differently? But, probably not. Mark, returning to Labour after 30
years – and finding “Tolly” still “doing the numbers” – would have known in an
instant which horse to put his money on.
Anyway, it’s impossible to argue with the optics. Standing
side-by-side, Szabo and Ardern speak eloquently of a party well-and-truly
equipped for the third decade of the twenty-first century. The idea that
politics might be a struggle between rulers and ruled; bosses and workers; rich
and poor: well, that’s just so twentieth century! A modern – nay, a post-modern
– political party is there to recruit and indoctrinate the personnel necessary
to ensure an “orderly circulation of elites”. It’s slogans aren’t drawn off the
placards of union picketers and Climate Strikers; they’re carefully crafted by
copy-writers, and then focus-group tested by public relations professionals and
advertising executives.
What’s more, Claire Szabo is taking up her presidential role
after serving as the CEO of Habitat For Humanity. Which is absolutely perfect!
After KiwiBuild was so comprehensively mismanaged by Phil Twyford, the party has
not only elected a new president from a thoroughly respectable not-for-profit,
but one who has also actually managed to get real “affordable houses” built!
When Mark walked out of the Labour Party in 1989 he was not
alone. It was in May of that year that Jim Anderton led between a third and a
half of the NZ Labour Party into “NewLabour” – soon to become the Alliance.
Except, of course, Anderton’s NewLabour Party wasn’t really “new” at all. The
imaginations of those who followed Anderton overflowed with visions of a
rebirth of the sort of working-class power that enabled Michael Joseph Savage
to transform a Depression-ravaged New Zealand into something the whole world
could admire. But, it was not to be. No matter what Labour did to its working-class
base, they never deserted the party. Like the loyal draught-horse, Boxer, in
George Orwell’s Animal Farm, they soldiered-on. That’s why Anderton’s
Alliance is long gone and Labour’s still here.
There’s a lot of dying in an old and trusted brand. While
Labour’s leaders can still raise people’s hopes, they’ll always be in with a
chance.
This essay was posted simultaneously on Bowalley Road and The Daily Blog
of Tuesday, 3 December 2019.
