Another election is finally over and
counted, although it was perhaps closer than many would have liked. The
ridiculousness of commentators readying their microphones before over 400,000
of the votes had even been counted was noted, however unexpected and completely
within their character. Only one percent separates National and the
Labour-Green bloc. The minor parties were generally crushed underfoot by
Labour’s rising tide. But big questions still remain, even after the votes had
finally been released by the Electoral Commission. What does this election
actually mean for the Left? What would it mean to have a new Labour government,
likely supported by the Greens and New Zealand First, in power? Alternatively, what
would a fourth term for National mean? What does the lack of support for minor
parties mean for the credibility of our electoral system, which was installed
to produce diverse parliaments?
Some of these questions bear easier
answers than others. On the electoral system, I have never understood the
argument that modifications should be made when one does not get the result one
wants. We do not live in a place where fascistic elements of politics threaten
to enter the House of Representatives, which is odd because our electoral
system is designed to reflect a place that indeed was. The destruction of small
parties was wrought for no other reason than voters’ will. Quite simply, Labour
was more appetising to an increasing number than, say, the Opportunities party
or the Māori Party. The more indolent of mind have suggested regressing to the
ridiculously unfair First Past the Post system. Yet others, such as Bryce
Edwards, have raised sensible questions about the 5% entrance threshold,
another German electoral influence. Perhaps this is an area that could be
looked at. The Netherlands lower house of parliament, for example, has no
threshold, and has thirteen parties occupying its 150 seats in the house. To
put that into perspective, the Australian lower house, with the same number of
seats, has just five parties and two independents, and only two parties (the
Liberal-National coalition and Labor) have more than one seat. It simply does
not compare. If such a logic were to be applied to our election results, TOP
and the Māori Party would definitely receive seat apportionments, and it would
be likely that the Legalise Cannabis Party at least scored one seat too on its
notably resilient 0.3% performance.
Some comment has been made on the Labour
Party’s result – including by me – and the disparity between their performance
in Auckland as compared to the rest of the country. I had a little tiff with
Branko Marcetic, whose writing I like a lot, on Twitter recently about the
immigration issue and whether it hurt Labour in Auckland. With respect I think
he is wrong about this. His claim that Labour did badly in Auckland rests on a
number of factors which are laid out in his Spinoff
piece. Now, in the hindsight provided by the special vote results being
available, a number of them must be re-evaluated. Labour has now won the party
in New Lynn and Te Atatu, came extraordinarily close in Mt Roskill and Auckland
Central, and reached the blissful heights of 70% once again in Mangere, its
most reliable stronghold. The other seats Marcetic lists are safe National
seats, which I am sure did not escape him, but it really was something to see
the results in East Coast Bays and Pakuranga held up as arguments to support
the claim that Labour is finding it hard in Auckland. It does not elude
Marcetic that Pacific Islanders vote overwhelmingly for Labour, but his claim
that North East Asians failed to turn out for Labour is immediately
contradicted in the next point – Labour seemed to do better in places with
higher numbers of Asian immigrants.
Notwithstanding the fact that most of this
amounted to augury, as the special votes had not yet been released, the
argument is simply not very credible. It may, of course, nonetheless be true,
but the likelihood, based on the direction of factors, suggests it isn’t. And
we certainly know it is less true since the release of the special votes count.
Although Marcetic sensibly qualifies his statements, I find it difficult to
accept even the central premise – that voters who have migrated to this country
would turn away from a party because of its immigration stance. As my partner,
an Indian migrant, said to me – it’s a non
sequitur to suggest that we care once we’re in! And he pointed me to the
number of Hispanic voters in the United States who ticked the Trump box at their
last election. This may sound unfair, but it’s not incorrect. In fact, I would
argue that the central premise is merely an extension of the fallacious
identity politics arguments Hillary Clinton relied on, to her detriment – that
she would pick up the ‘woman vote’ and the ‘black vote’ because those
particular demographics couldn’t possibly vote for her racist, misogynist
opponent.
A particularly annoying facet of
commentary – especially from international media – was the inevitable
comparisons of Winston Peters with Donald Trump. I know that the election of
Trump had the media collectively slapping their own backsides for not calling
it, and that almost the entire world burst into tears on inauguration day, but
these comparisons are lazy and, frankly, stupid. Trump is not a lever upon
which things have to be compared. The
Guardian pulled a similar stunt with the comparison of New Zealand First,
Peters’ party, to right-wing populist European parties. Peters does engage in
racist dogwhistling from time to time, but comes nowhere near the level of the
Front National, UKIP or the Freedom Party of Austria on any objective scale of
racist policy or vitriol, and his policies are much like those of Labour prior
to 1980 – or perhaps more accurately, Muldoonite National. Despite all that, I
don’t think anything could beat the racist and undignified comment from Gareth
Morgan, that Winston Peters was an ‘Uncle Tom’. I would have almost clapped for
the loud denunciations from left-liberals had some of them not already
suggested something similar about Peters themselves. And yes, that includes
those who said Peters had inculcated too much of the ‘Western mindset’.
This election was not so good for the
minor parties. It would have been very interesting indeed had Andrew Little
carried on as leader of Labour – my prediction was that Labour and New Zealand
First would have been locked for a second-place photo finish; that was how
badly Labour would have done. It may have been that Labour failed to surpass
20%, doing worse than (ironically) Bill English as National Party leader in
2002 against the undeniably popular Helen Clark. The Greens were also badly
hurt by Labour’s recovery, even if much of it was self-inflicted. They
begrudgingly received my party vote – it was in spite of how they treated
Metiria Turei, as when she went off the list, this signalled to many that their
party vote wouldn’t bring her back. She should be proud of her second-place
finish in Te Tai Tonga, a Labour stronghold. It was also sad that Mojo Mathers,
the nation’s first deaf MP, was shunted down the list away from a viable spot
to be re-elected, for younger alternatives. Of those two, Chloe Swarbrick – a
fantastic debater and interviewer – did well during the campaign. Golriz
Ghahraman, frankly, has yet to prove herself as a newcomer. She was practically
invisible in the campaign. It is nice that she is New Zealand’s first refugee
MP, but she is no ordinary refugee; having studied at Oxford University and was
formerly a lawyer for the United Nations. Her legal background, domestically,
however, is formidable, having campaigned for the rights of children, disabled
persons, and indeed refugees.
The two casualties of the election were
United Future and the Māori Party. The exit of United Future brings an end of
an era to small-party Christian politics, having finally been exiled from
parliament. Those who know their party history well will recall that the name
‘United Future’ is a synthesis of the United party – a liberal centrist entity
made up of Labour and National defectors – and the ‘Future NZ’ party, a
Christian-based party made up of bits and pieces of Christian Heritage and
other such outfits. United Future suffered a split between the more liberal
Peter Dunne-aligned faction, and the Gordon Copeland-led conservative faction.
Copeland left to form the Kiwi Party which was unsuccessful at getting into
parliament. In 2011, the Kiwi Party joined Colin Craig’s Conservatives, which
eventually – as we all know – was sunk by scandal after ridiculous scandal.
Dunne, however, a former Labour MP, hung on, through Labour coalition
governments and National coalition governments. He resigned when it eventuated
that he would be unlikely to retake his seat of Ōhariu, based in western Wellington
City. The new leader to take over was the admittedly handsome and intelligent
Damian Light; a wonderful choice, I thought, but this had no effect, with the
party receiving one-fifth of its 2014 votes. In all honesty Light should
abandon ship and attempt to become a Labour MP or an electorate independent. I
think he’d be quite good. He made some noise about ‘having a social conscience’
and how this put him at odds with National, and filled his campaign appearances
with gestures to the Left. It’s quite obvious that he has broadly left-wing
views. Without him there, effectively the lights have gone out on Christian
politics, for better or worse. (Most of the Christian parties were filled to
the brim with appalling opportunists, and for more on that, google Graham
Capill.)
The other, more prominent casualty was
that of the Māori Party, which came as a shock to almost everyone except me, it
seems. I had predicted this before Winston Peters had said anything ominous
about the matter, in any case. In my piece on the class divide in Māori
politics, I said that the Māori Party had increasingly become the party of an
emerging iwi elite, with many of its high-ranking officials being members of
the Iwi Chairs Forum, and it now represents in the majority of the Māori
electorate elite atrophy that will be thrown out. Of course, I attracted
derision from self-assured feel-good liberal types who thought I was being
disingenuous. I had more than enough evidence for this. The Māori Party,
despite championing themselves during the election as having “whanau at the
heart” and being an “independent Māori voice in parliament”, did their best to
avoid any of the real problems that Māori were facing both nationally and
regionally. They openly supported gentrification in Glen Innes and Point
England, chastising Labour for not joining them in that support. They did
absolutely nothing to lobby the NZTA or any other influence to seal the
dangerous, toxic dust clouds whipped up by logging trucks driving on rural
roads in inland Māori communities in the Far North. More Māori are in prison
than ever before, under their watch! So when Marama Fox had the audacity to say
that Māori had voted for a return to the “age of colonisation” by overwhelmingly
supporting Labour over her party, her words rang hollow. In fact, I think she knows that her party has contributed
little that is positive or meaningful for the majority of Māori people. I liked
Fox when she first entered parliament; she was frank yet willing to support
elements of the Left on various causes. I stopped liking her when her good
qualities verged into twin evils: she became both embittered and entitled; and
her unthinking conservatism seeped in along with her lack of willingness to devote
even just a passing thought or insight to extremely important issues. Her most
foolish and inept exhibition was when she told me at a university debate that
her party did not care about tax evasion, because (according to her) Māori did
not care about what was revealed in the Panama Papers leaks. Instead, she would
rather focus on suicide prevention initiatives – having failed to make the
elementary link that more tax dollars from multinationals would equal more
money to spend on such social programmes.
It is the
biggest betrayal that the liberal Left allowed this racket to carry on in such
an undignified manner without even a hint of meaningful criticism, and it is
pathetic that many (who I know would not have even voted for it) expressed
sadness and lament upon realising it would not be back in. The liberal Left was
virtually silent – perhaps with quiet embarrassment – when the Māori Party
announced an immigration work sponsorship policy that can be described as nothing
other than state-sponsored, state-encouraged slave labour. And yet, it is
abundantly clear that this party should never have been supported by anyone calling themselves Left in the
first place. The Māori Party was always at home with National because it suited
what it ended up becoming: a revanchist class enemy that had nothing but petty
resentment for Labour over the admittedly awful foreshore and seabed saga, and
a clear direction to secure and place under private ownership key natural
resources for a growing iwi corporation asset base. The people I feel truly
sorry for is the activists, the party’s rank-and-file, most of whom I know were
obviously committed to causes beyond this. If you’re not prepared to take my
word for it on any of this, why don’t you ask Māori lawyer, activist, and –
most tellingly – former Māori Party candidate herself on the Left faction,
Annette Sykes, who said in 2010:
[The 1980s] saw
the rise of a Māori elite within the process of litigating, negotiating and
then implementing Treaty settlements, many of whom have become active
sycophants of the broader neoliberal agenda which transfers a limited subset of
publicly owned assets and resources into the private ownership of corporations
to settle the injustices that have been inflicted upon hapu and iwi Māori. An
aura has built up around those iwi leaders who, in tandem with the Māori Party,
are now treated as the authorised voices of all Māori.
So ‘authorised’ in fact that commentators
in the media, including the most obvious sycophantic cheerleaders, referred
unironically to their loss as the farewell to parliament’s “independent Māori
voice”, as if Labour’s (or for that matter National’s, the Greens’ or New
Zealand First’s) Māori MP’s in fact did not have a voice of their own. New
Zealand First even has a Māori leader, and the Greens formerly a Māori
co-leader (and hopefully still will, as they would be stupid not to elect
Marama Davidson as the next one). It is almost a parody that the new hopefuls
to revive the Māori Party that I have seen touted around are Lance O’Sullivan
and Carrie Stoddart-Smith. The former, a respected GP, made his feelings known
when he claimed he would partially defund the health system if elected (clearly
experience can sometimes be a virtue), while the latter spent more time denying
the existence of a Māori elite and making odious, inexcusable comments that
analysing Māori along class lines was racist and colonising, than she did in contributing
anything positive to the Māori Party campaign. Frankly, Tariana Turia’s recent
appalling interview should be a symbolic death rattle.
Now, on the subject of the Labour Party. Labour
spent nine years criticising the government in opposition, some of which was
very effective, but when the election campaign came along – especially after
Jacinda Ardern was elected leader – they seemed to renounce doing anything
about those points of criticism. Key issues are obviously National’s truly
atrocious record on education, housing and healthcare – literally all three of
them. Housing prices in Auckland have followed global trends in ‘primate’ urban
agglomerations or ‘world cities’ – becoming drastically unaffordable, with
Auckland now reportedly more so than any other city in the world. This is
starting to have a spillover on house prices in the Far North, Tauranga and the
Coromandel, all popular retirement destinations for Aucklanders; and Hamilton,
now easily within the Auckland commuter belt. The problem, obviously, is the
catch-22 of home-owning capitalism: as much as one would like prices to go
down, home-owners depend on prices rising if they want a significant return on
their investment. This is built into the structure of the housing market and is
not going to disappear through piecemeal reform. This is why a broad coalition
of the ruling elites, the landowning class and the aspirational middle-class
and nouveaux riches militate against
any reasonable reformist measures to bring house prices down. Labour will do virtually
nothing. In education, National has effectively trashed the system at all
levels with its charter school pet project a complete failure, and performance-based
pay and league tables that have now caused a crisis of confidence in the
national assessment systems and in the teaching profession. Teachers are
quitting en masse in frustration at
the government’s emphatic inability to do anything about it, and it is well known that the sector is
in unprecedented crisis. Auckland has a massive problem with over half of all
schools operating on a shortage of four or more teachers. Universities have
undertaken massive job cuts and extreme programme contractions to prevent
hauling in debt caused by regularised underfunding. What will Labour do about
it? Likely zilch, short of stopping Nikki Kaye doing anything to make the
problem worse.
Labour and the Greens have hamstrung
themselves by committing to passionless ‘fiscal responsibility constraints’
designed to please Treasury and business elites, and probably little else.
Jacinda Ardern’s party, if indeed it finds itself forming a coalition
government in the eventuating days, will not eliminate child poverty or
homelessness as claimed if it isn’t willing to make deep structural changes to
organisations like Housing New Zealand and Work and Income; reversing their
peripheralisation will take enormous amounts of effort, time and very likely
money. However, the fiscal rules Labour signed up to mean that it will spend
zero extra budgetary dollars on any initiatives to do anything about those
problems, aside from complementary austerity cuts in other areas in order to do
it. Labour will also not make any tax changes in its first term. Ardern was
backed into a corner on any taxes that would have an effect, and her ‘tax
working group’ idea – something she retained from Andrew Little’s monotonous
time as leader – raised worrying alarms more than jingle bells, especially when
she said Treasury officials would likely play a major role on it. Perhaps we
all need to read Bruce Jesson’s Fragments
of Labour book for the story on what happened the last time Labour let the
‘Treasury experts’ do the hard work on finance policy for them.
The politics around immigration has been
particularly vile on all sides. The Left took a stance against it this time,
with Labour and New Zealand First frankly transcending the boundaries on
racism, inexcusably. The Mana Party, which to be honest was not a left-wing
party in this election, or ever really since the leftists ditched it after the
failure of Internet-Mana (now it’s merely a bizarre nationalist soapbox for
Hone Harawira), was the worst offender. But on the other side, the alliance of starry-eyed
liberals who had no patience for explanations of why immigration became a hot
potato while busy militating against a non-existent and totally fictitious
surge in white identity politics in Aotearoa, along with the opportunistic and
hypocritical National (who had recently cut family reunification migrant
numbers prior to the election) and the floundering Māori Party’s immigrant
slave labour policy, was honestly equally execrable. Not a single commentator
was able to give an appropriate class analysis of the situation. Winston
Peters, despite his racism, is actually right when he says a high volume of
easily exploitable immigrant labour will drive down domestic wages. He isn’t
just saying that. This is clearly an inconvenient truth. But the emphasis on
workers pales in comparison to the totally unnecessary and brain-dead
identification of National with “Chinese interests”, most vocally heard when
Jian Yang’s possible links to the Chinese Communist Party’s spy training
programme were unearthed. National is the party of ruling elites regardless of
what country they are from, and they are to be opposed by socialists in the
very same way.
As David Harvey perceptively concluded
more than ten years ago, the deep cuts and seismic shift of power from states
to corporations that is often described as ‘neoliberalism’ has led social
democracy into a corner. The difference in New Zealand, as in Australia, was
that such an agenda was undertaken by the social democratic party itself. Many
unionists and socialists who abandoned the Labour Party may yet have returned
this time, but it is still a shadow of its former self, seemingly attracting
more middle-class than working-class voters. It is a thoroughly unappealing
party for much of its former core constituency. But one disconcerting coterie
that has apparently flocked in to show its support for this ‘refreshed’ Labour
Party are the pseudo-Trotskyist groups, Socialist Aotearoa and the
International Socialist Organisation. The Socialist Equality Group’s statement
on the election put it pithily and wonderfully succinctly, that SA and the ISO
are simply “in lockstep with Labour and the unions.” That is, if Labour sways
to the right, you should expect SA and the ISO to sway with them. The ISO
formerly supported Mana in all its nationalist tirades and ironic concessions
to Kim Dotcom. And the unions, as we know, have become nigh on useless and
unreliable, and in the main should not be trusted to do anything positive for
workers. The only strong unions left with any clout and actual sense exist in
the dairy workers and education sectors.
