First, Fill Your War-Chest: With its radically innovative and politically transgressive “Future of Work” policy package, Labour should be able to pass the hat around New Zealand’s major enterprises with every hope of receiving more than polite refusals.
THE THIRD TERM in Opposition is always the most dangerous.
It’s the time when sticking to one’s principles is hardest, and when the
blandishments of “professionals” promising easy victories are at their most
persuasive. The prospect of another three years in opposition: of feeling
powerless and useless; looms ahead of Opposition MPs like a prison sentence.
They’ll do anything to escape. To win.
In 2016 Labour is in its third term of opposition, and it’s
easy to imagine how desperately its caucus is looking for a way out. The party
is heading into its hundredth year without a charismatic leader, shorn of just
about all of the policies it campaigned on in the 2011 and 2014 elections; and
as close to broke as any major party should ever be. What Labour needs is
reinvigoration – reinvention even. Otherwise it risks being rejected by the
electorate as too old and too irrelevant to make a difference. Yesterday’s
party, filled with yesterday’s politicians.
Labour’s been here before – most recently in 1998. That,
too, was the middle year of a National-led government’s third term, but it’s
there that the similarities end. The government of Jenny Shipley was a
government of rebels and turncoats and it was deeply unpopular. It was also a
government made up of politicians elected under a radically new and different
electoral system – MMP.
The Bolger-led National Government’s opponents had split
their votes between three parties: Labour, NZ First and the Alliance; and most
of them expected a government composed of all three. Winston Peters confounded
those expectations by throwing in his lot with Bolger – a decision which
inflicted near-fatal damage on his party. NZ First’s generosity
notwithstanding, however, by December of 1997 Shipley had rolled Bolger and
split Peter’s parliamentary ranks in two.
The Shipley Government never took. Lacking democratic
legitimacy it was widely regarded as a political “dead man walking” towards the
1999 electoral gallows. It’s only hope of survival was the bitter enmity
between Labour and the left-wing Alliance, led by Jim Anderton. If these two
parties were to contest the 1999 election as rivals, and the Left presented to
the voters as hopelessly divided, then there was a chance – a very slim chance
– that National could come through the middle.
Would Labour risk it? Could Helen Clark beat Anderton’s
Alliance into a poor third and win power in its own right? There were those in
Labour’s caucus who believed it could, but following the Alliance’s
surprisingly strong showing in the Taranaki-King Country by-election of May
1998 (Labour polled 17.53 percent to the Alliance’s 15.46 percent) Helen Clark
opted to accept the olive branch offered by Anderton and publically announced
Labour’s readiness to form a loose coalition government with the Alliance
following the 1999 general election.
The rest, as they say, is history.
In 2016, is the Labour leader, Andrew Little, also faced
with Clark’s 1998 predicament? Is he, too, confronted with the prospect of a
National Party Government only too willing to repeat its propaganda victory of
2014, when the Labour/Green/NZ First/Mana opposition (not-to-mention Kim
Dotcom) were successfully portrayed as a ship of fools, with everyone rowing in
opposite directions? And, if so, does he really have any other option except to
follow Clark’s 1998 example and announce Labour’s readiness to form a coalition
government with the Greens in 2017?
That is certainly the option progressive New Zealanders are
hoping Labour will take. Their not unreasonable assumption being that a
coalition with the Greens will anchor Labour firmly on the Centre-Left, and
decisively weaken the right-wing faction of Labour’s caucus. There are,
however, a number of problems with this analysis.
First and foremost is the undeniable fact of the Prime
Minister’s – and his government’s – still astonishing levels of popularity.
John Key is no Jenny Shipley, and his government certainly isn’t cobbled
together from rebels and turncoats. Far from being a “dead man walking”, Key’s
government shows every sign of robust political health and is more than ready
to make a successful bid for a fourth term. It’s a level of confidence that’s
likely to keep National’s election war-chest full-to-overflowing (and Labour’s
empty). It also serves as a warning to the all-important news media that, as
things now stand, changing sides would not be a good idea.
In this gloomy context, the recent statements from Grant
Robertson make bright and sunshiny sense. With his eyes not on 1998, but 1983,
Robertson is readying the Labour Party for another bid to win the backing of
big business. Like Roger Douglas before him, he is inviting his party to become,
once again, New Zealand’s great political facilitator. Last time it was the
Free Market Revolution of 1984-93 that Labour facilitated. This time it will be
what the one-percenter luminaries gathering for the World Economic Forum at
Davos are calling “The Fourth Industrial Revolution”.
It’s an extraordinarily clever move on Robertson’s part. The
NZ Herald’s “Mood of the Boardroom” revealed
that, while appreciated as a canny election-winner, Key is not regarded as the
political and economic innovator New Zealand so desperately needs. With his
radically innovative and politically transgressive “Future of Work” policy
package, Robertson should be able to pass the hat around New Zealand’s major
enterprises with every hope of receiving more than polite refusals.
Nor will he be alone. The Greens’ James Shaw is perfectly
placed to act as Robertson’s seconder in the nation’s boardrooms. With his
assurances that the Greens, too, are committed to developing a whole new
political and economic paradigm – one equal to the enormous challenges of the
21st Century – the business community’s fears about the Greens can
be sufficiently allayed to make the announcement, at Labour’s hundredth
annual conference, of a Red-Green Alliance something big business can welcome –
rather than condemn.
Will it be enough to defeat the Third Term Blues? Possibly.
But it will certainly be enough to render Labour electorally competitive in
ways the New Zealand electorate has not seen for 18 – maybe even 33 – years.
This essay was
originally posted on The Daily Blog
of Monday, 18 January 2016.
