David Shearer is a dead man walking. That is, his failure to reconnect a cynical electorate with Labour means that his continuation as party leader is untenable. So, is David Cunliffe once again vying for the big job? And with his recent ‘anti-Shearer’ speech calling for the party to more strongly differentiate itself from National, do we have a full-blown conspiracy in our midst? Are a group of Labour insiders planning to take hold of the organisation and push it to the left? In this guest blogpost, John Moore speculates on plotting against the Labour leader, and asks what this all really means for the trajectory of the party?
Labour MP Clare Curran’s recent rants and attacks on the internet will seem to many both puzzling and peculiar. She has told the Green Party to get out of Labour’s territory, has taken a leaf out of Winston Peter’s book in railing against a fanciful threat from China, and has lashed out at perceived critics on the left and right. However, her desperate and ill-conceived remarks need to be contexualised. In this guest post, John Moore argues that Curran is a minor MP of a party that is desperate but unable to make political headway and is heading towards an historic electoral defeat. Curran therefore is merely a personification of a party in crisis, a party that is devoid of ideas or vision. [read more below]
The Labour Party has a massive image problem. It’s seen by the public as too politically correct, earnest, dull, mean-spirited and authoritarian. Hence the nanny state label attached to the last Labour Government. This week’s launch of Labour’s “Let’s Not” viral website campaign attempts to combat Labour’s negative image by offering up something irreverent, humourous, and light-hearted to the Facebook generation - those in the 18-40 age-bracket who get a lot of their information from the internet. These are also the people who are less likely to engage in politics and to vote. And they’re the group that are probably most alienated from Labour, due to the party’s anti-fun image. The “Let’s Not” campaign is relatively apolitical, with many of the jokes having little or nothing to do with politics. From Labour’s point of view, then, it’s a perfect approach for our post-ideological age. The party has noticed the anti-political mood and cynicism amongst young (non) voters and is seeking to match that with it’s own lowest common denominator approach to communicating its politics. Unfortunately for Labour, the “Let’s Not” web site is more likely to be seen by most as gimmicky, superficial, condescending, insular, and missing the zeitgeist by about ten years. [Read more below]
It was rather appropriate that the Labour Party frontbench MPs met in Dunedin last month to discuss the party’s on-going woes over leadership, poll ratings, and the Darren Hughes saga. This city has a strong connection with Labour’s past, present and future. It is especially notable that many of the party’s rising stars and leadership contenders have strong links to Dunedin – David Cunliffe and Grant Robertson have spent considerable time here, and David Parker still does. All three of them are increasingly talked about as replacements for Phil Goff. [This column, written for Fairfax’s Dunedin DScene newspaper, continues below]
Is that the best that Labour could come up with? The Labour Party list for 2011 can be described as conservative, a poor use of the MMP list system, promoting non-performers and careerists, and effectively it amounts to ‘incumbency protection’. But more than anything else, the list proves once again that Labour cares more about ‘identity politics’ than ‘class politics’. Quite simply, the party is so consumed with the social backgrounds of its candidates – especially their gender, ethnicity and sexuality – that it forgets about socio-economics and actually being a workers’ party. These are the points that I tried to get across yesterday in interviews on RNZ's Morning Report (listen here) and TVNZ's Close Up (watch here). This blog post elaborates on the points I tried to make on the radio, as well as analysing some of the demographics involved in Labour’s likely list MPs, and it surveys what other commentators have been saying about Labour’s list. [Read more below]
The principle of ‘innocent until proven guilty’ does not apply in parliamentary politics. Members of Parliament do not have the luxury of simply requesting that all legal avenues be followed before public and political judgements are made. In just this one parliamentary term, politician scandals involving law-breaking or otherwise have been abundant – leading to resignations and serious demotions involving Richard Worth, Pansy Wong, Phil Heatley, David Garrett, Shane Jones, Chris Carter, and now possibly Darren Hughes. It’s too early to be sure what is likely to happen to Darren Hughes, but there’s a significant chance of resignation from the list MP. Ultimately what will determine Darren Hughes’ fate is whether any criminal charges are brought against him and whether he faces a conviction. If so, he will surely resign, and his political career will almost certainly be over. [Read more below]
Some political commentators – and Labour and National party activists, too – are suggesting that this year’s New Zealand general election will present voters with a genuine ideological choice: between a radical leftwing Labour Party that favours nationalised industry and a radical rightwing National Party that wants to privatise everything. Any such description is hugely inaccurate, and a proper examination of the situation would show that the positions of both parties on the issue of state owned enterprises are actually remarkably similar. Once the rhetoric from Labour and National is put to one side, it obvious that both parties favour a mixture of state and private ownership of industry, with only degrees of difference in how much should be owned and which direction should be taken. But given that there is at least some differences opening up on the issue of asset sales – and that this is set to be some sort of election issue, I hope to write a few posts in the near future examining it all in detail. This initial blog post merely raises the question – from a leftwing point of view – of whether there is actually anything progressive about the state owning businesses. It argues that the New Zealand left have developed a nostalgic and false idea that the government ownership of businesses like TV2 or NZ Post is something wonderful. [Read more below]
The year 2009 was a hectic one in New Zealand politics, partly because it was the first year of the new National Party Government’s term in office. At a general election in November of the previous year, National had ousted the Labour Party from its three-term tenure in office and formed a single-party minority government with support agreements with the Act Party, the Maori Party and United Future – all of whom gained ministerial roles outside the cabinet. In this first year, the new administration was both ideologically centrist and highly popular, being challenged only on difficult issues relating to the economic recession, political finance controversies over MPs’ expenses and various race relations questions. The following blog post examines these issues via a ‘Review of New Zealand politics in 2009’ which has just been published as a peer-reviewed journal article in the top political science periodical, the European Journal of Political Research (in the December 2010 edition). As well as looking at how the National Government fared in 2009, it also briefly analyses the main issues in politics (such as the economy, social issues, political finance scandals) and the changes in the other parliamentary political parties. [Read more below]
The New Zealand public doesn’t hear much from Helen Clark these days. Ensconced in her United Nations career in New York, she’s generally not talking to the media about anything to do with her time as Prime Minister (‘I never talk about that’,’ That’s for others to judge’). So it’s good to see the Sunday Star-Times running a piece today on Clark in their Sunday magazine (which is normally reserved for much more lightweight lifestyle features). ‘View from the top’ (or, the alternative title, ‘Helen in New York’) is written by freelance journalist Sam Eichblatt who went and interviewed Clark at the UN in New York. She also rung me for some comments about Helen Clark’s time as prime minister, which have ended up being published, so this blog post reproduces those comments, expands on some of the points I made, and also highlights some of the other observations made in the article. [Read more below].
Matt McCarten’s candidacy in the Mana by-election is one of the most promising developments on the New Zealand left for many years. Not only does this mean that the by-election just became much more interesting, McCarten’s campaign has much wider political ramifications – for example, it could be the launching pad for a new party to fill the gaping big hole on the left of the political spectrum in New Zealand. This blog post looks at why McCarten is standing in the election, whether he could actually win the seat, who might support him, and what it all means for Labour and the Greens. [Read more below]
The industrial dispute over the filming of the The Hobbit in New Zealand is a long way from reaching the status of seminal political events in New Zealand history such as the 1951 waterfront lockout or the 1981 anti-Springbok tour. But it’s certainly got some similarities. As with those highly important events that divided the country, the Labour Party has been highly pragmatic in its attempts to keep its distance lest any actions or statements of principle have any possibility of damaging its electoral popularity. So just as in 1951, when Labour Party leader Walter Nash declared that ‘We are not for the waterside workers, and we are not against them’, again in 2010 Labour is essentially saying the same thing, desperately avoiding having to take the side of the workers against the torrent of the campaign against them. [Read more below]
In the extraordinary breakdown of the relationship between MP Chris Carter and the Labour Party all the participants have come out of it looking rather pathetic. Certainly no players in this latest parliamentary soap opera appeared to be operating along lines of principle – instead, they have all proved themselves to be rather self-serving and without principle. Thus, the whole affair has been a good case study of the state of the modern Labour Party as well as wider parliamentary politics in New Zealand. Rather than being about the big issues in politics, the dispute seemed remarkably pitiful and personal. Indeed, it is extraordinary that what has mostly been a rather trivial affair has resulted in history making whereby Carter has become the first ever MP to be expelled from both the parliamentary Labour caucus and the wider Labour Party. And yet it’s still not clear exactly what his crime was, apart from being a dissenting party member who acted like most maneuvering politicians, using subterfuge and plotting in an attempt to further their own ends. Frankly, Chris Carter’s beef with his party was simply about his mistreatment by the leadership, and the leadership’s beef with him was that he had become an embarrassment and a media distraction – which is not exactly ‘meaningful politics’. Yet, despite all this ‘real-politicking’, there is actually a deeper ideological issue involved. Carter’s expulsion can be seen as a signal of Phil Goff’s strong desire to expunge all elements from the party that in the public’s mind represent the ‘bad old days’ of the Helen Clark Labour Government. It seems that Chris Carter personifies the socially liberal, nanny-state politics and arrogance that saw Labour turfed out of office, and therefore he had to be marginalised from the new-look Labour Party. I spoke about some of this on TVNZ News recently – watch the interview here – and this blog post elaborates on some of my arguments. [Read more below]
“For over a decade now, the Labour and National parties have been using law and order as an electoral weapon – both have been trying to outbid each other to be the most reactionary in terms of crime and punishment. This has meant that under the Clark Labour Government the prison population virtually doubled, and now National seem to want to keep it escalating. So in the 2011 general election, what are you going to do – and what can we do – to stop law and order policy being a cynical electoral weapon of the political parties?” – That’s the question that I asked last week at a ‘Public Square’ forum on Crime and Punishment at the University of Otago. The issues of crime and punishment have become central drivers in electoral politics, so the topic is worth considerable examination. [Read more below]
There are obviously different types of inequality that pervade contemporary New Zealand society. Traditionally the political left – and those concerned with equality –have been most concerned with socio-economic inequality, but this changed in last few decades of the twentieth century. This third blog post on ‘Inequality in NZ’ explains how the left shifted its concern from issues of economic inequality to that of social inequality, or as one academic book title put it, ‘How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality’ (Benn Michaels, 2007). The material in this blog post is taken from a draft paper that I delivered to a interdisciplinary Workshop on Inequality at the University of Otago in June entitled ‘Why Economic Inequality Matters’, and it also draws heavily on previous blog posts about ‘Identity politics vs class politics’. [Read more below]
The main problems that the political left has had with the New Zealand Labour Party in recent years are epitomized by ex-Labour Minister Judith Tizard. She personifies virtually all that was wrong with the Labour Party under Helen Clark’s leadership: arrogant, Establishment-oriented, economically neoliberal, and obsessed with identity politics. The fact that she and many Labour MPs appeared to morph so easily into being the New Establishment is now reflected in many of the revelations coming out of the ministerial credit card documents that have been released. There are just so many examples of the culture of entitlement and extravagance that pervades the ‘political class’, but the one that stands out as the best indictment of the bourgeois nature of the Labour Party is Tizard’s taxpayer-funded purchase of a $155 bottle of Bollinger bubbly. But she wasn’t the only one. As the 7000-document release is slowly processed by the media and public we’re finding out just how bourgeois the previous Labour administration was. [Read more below]
John Key’s ‘blind’ trust is currently under intense scrutiny, and rightly so. The financial arrangements of politicians and political parties deserve being examined and analysed by civil society. And while the current ‘Highwater-gate’ scandal is still hard to fully comprehend (see the Standard for the best critiques, and see Tracey Watkins for the best defence of Key), it means that more and more questions are being raised about how the political establishment run both their and our financial affairs. Today, for instance, the National Business Review runs an insightful piece by Rob Hosking on conflicts of interest, using the example of the Clark Labour Government’s encouragement of a property boom, which furthered the financial interest of Labour MPs while putting housing out of reach of the less well off. [Read more below]
Did the Labour Party lose the 2008 election simply due to a ‘benign dismissal’ by a public that wanted to give the other political team a go at running things? Labour MP Grant Robertson thinks so. Robertson, who is a former adviser to Helen Clark and now the MP for Wellington Central, writes about the reasons for Labour’s defeat in his chapter on the Labour campaign in the new post-election book Key to Victory: The New Zealand General Election of 2008 edited by Stephen Levine and Nigel S. Roberts. This blog post briefly relays Robertson’s intelligent, but well-spun chapter, noting a few flaws. [Read more below]
Why was Labour turfed out of office in 2008? Colin James puts down the Government’s electoral decline to Labour’s ‘failure of political management’ in areas such as the Electoral Finance Act and the so-called anti-smacking bill, as well as generally being punished for pushing a heavy socially liberal agenda. Labour also lost the electoral fight to show that it was the toughest on law and order. James says that the victorious National Party got there due to John Key’s ‘bland leading the bland’ strategy, which now results in a managerial ‘government by MBA’. James writes about these issue and others in a chapter entitled ‘2008: The last baby-boomer election’ in the new post-election book Key to Victory: The New Zealand General Election of 2008 (edited by Stephen Levine and Nigel S. Roberts). This blog post highlights some of the salient points made in this chapter. [Read more below]
Commercialism Vs Professionalism. That’s the tension present in modern media coverage of politics according to Babak Bahador, who’s written a very good chapter entitled ‘Media coverage of the election’ in the new post-election book Key to Victory: The New Zealand General Election of 2008 (edited by Stephen Levine and Nigel S. Roberts). Bahador asks, ‘So how did the New Zealand media balance these forces during the 2008 election? Did they follow commercial trends in other Western democracies towards increasingly partisan, negative, presidential and superficial coverage? Or did they maintain a reasonable degree of professionalism in their coverage and fulfil their democratic duty?’. He attempts to answer these questions with a comprehensive content analysis of the New Zealand Herald, Dominion Post, the Press, and TV1 and TV3 evening news. He comes up with some very interesting results. [Read more below]
The Labour Party thought that the 2008 New Zealand general election would be won on the issue of trust (i.e. voters becoming suspicious of ‘slippery John’ and his ‘hidden agenda’), whereas National thought it would be won on the issue of leadership personality and engagement with voters (i.e. the idea of Helen Clark being an out-of-touch elitist vs ‘common John’ who could relate socially to ordinary Kiwis). In the end, Labour was wrong and National was right, and critical ‘image events’ helped determine National’s win according to Claire Robinson’s chapter entitled ‘Images of political leadership in the campaign’ in the new post-election book Key to Victory: The New Zealand General Election of 2008 (edited by Stephen Levine and Nigel S. Roberts) In fact, National effectively won the election back in mid-2007 by fighting and winning on the issue of leadership personality. [Read more below]
The Labour Party obviously hasn’t learned much from the severe public ignomany suffered when it was revealed that the party had been paying for its electioneering Pledge Card with public funds while in government. Their latest rort – running a heavily branded bus campaign around the country – is no less electioneering, yet Labour has once again used taxpayer funds to pay for this political advertising. This blog post looks at whether such electioneering can really be called ‘legitimate’, even if the exercise is made to fit into the dodgy Parliamentary Service rules. Regardless of the expenditure’s legal status, few voters will appreciate having to pay for such overt political advertising. [Read more below]
Was Labour’s election loss in 2008 a ‘benign dismissal’? Therese Arseneau is not so sure that it was. Certainly National’s 2008 win was the result of a much cleverer and pragmatic electoral strategy than in 2005. Furthermore, although not unexciting, the campaign was rather lackluster, without any significantly defining issues, polarisation or passion. This is what Arseneau writes about in her chapter in the new post-election book Key to Victory: The New Zealand General Election of 2008 edited by Stephen Levine and Nigel S. Roberts. [Read more below]
The National and Green parties won the battle of YouTube in the New Zealand general election of 2008 according to a chapter entitled ‘2008: The YouTube campaign’ by Rob Salmond in the new post-election book Key to Victory: The New Zealand General Election of 2008 edited by Stephen Levine and Nigel S. Roberts. The chapter looks ‘at the different ways in which political parties used YouTube to communicate with New Zealanders’, and argues that successful strategies involved putting positive-themed political advertisements on television and using YouTube for the negative, attack-advertising. Unsurprisingly, twice as many YouTube clips were negative, and on average these were watched by 2.5 times more than positive videos. [Read more below]
New Zealand’s preeminent psephologists – that is, political scientists that study and explain elections - Stephen Levine and Nigel S. Roberts have just published their latest book, entitled Key to Victory: The New Zealand General Election of 2008. This edited collection is their ‘eighth in a series of New Zealand post-election books that have followed on from conferences held shortly after each general election’. The book attempts, they say, to provide ‘an overall perspective of what occurred and why’. As well as editing the book, Levine and Roberts wrote two chapters and a preface, which are discussed in this blog post. This work explains some of the factors shaping voting behaviour, making use of a pre-election voter survey that they commissioned – which they’ve done in every election since 1984. The results show, for instance that the Greens were the least liked party in the 2008 election, and that Helen Clark was no match for John Key in what was a two-horse leadership race [Read more below]
In the 2008 general election, half of voters (51%) thought there were only ‘minor differences’ between the parties during the campaign, while only 38% thought there were actually major differences between the parties. Furthermore, when survey respondents were asked to place the parties on the left-right spectrum, ‘A third could not place Labour or National’. These findings from the New Zealand Election Survey surely reflects the policy convergence of the parties, and are detailed in Jack Vowles’ new academic chapter about the election. Entitled ‘The 2008 Election: Why National Won’, Vowles’ chapter is in the just published fifth edition of New Zealand Government and Politics, edited by Raymond Miller. Vowles provides many other interesting statistics about voters and the parties. This blog post highlights some of these things. [Read more below]
National won the 2008 New Zealand general election because it ran a relatively conservative election campaign, promised little real change, but most importantly, it was an attractive option because it would be ‘a government not led by Helen Clark’. The whole campaign fight was largely about Clark and the unpopular perception of the politically correct regime she had established. The result was a new National Government that is spectacularly diverse in its makeup. This is what Victoria University of Wellington political scientists Stephen Levine and Nigel Roberts say in a new academic chapter about the election. Entitled ‘The General Election of 2008’, Levine and Roberts’ chapter is in the just published fifth edition of New Zealand Government and Politics, edited by Raymond Miller. The chapter is also notable for uncovering some interesting facts about the 2008 election campaign and the resulting Parliament. This blog post highlights some of these things. [Read more below]
Many commentators and leftists have struggled to reconcile the parallel development and dominance of neoliberal economic policies with the development and dominance of social liberalism and identity politics in New Zealand. Since the mid-1980s, governments of all hues have, on the one hand been economically rightwing, and on the other, relatively ‘progressive’ on social issues. For example, during the new-right reform period of the 1980s, feminists and gay campaigners were welcomed into the Establishment. And the current National regime has now embraced Maori nationalists. Yet these have not been distinct and unrelated developments. In contrast to the commonly held view that sees the coexistence of neoliberal economic, and socially liberal policies as a contradiction, this blog post attempts to highlight how policies such as biculturalism and neoliberal orthodoxies actually supplement each other. More broadly, the new liberal social agenda promoted initially by the Fourth Labour Government and state bureaucracies went hand in hand with neoliberal polices. [Read more below]
One of the most perplexing questions in the history of the left in New Zealand has been: Why was it a Labour Party that implemented the radical anti-worker neoliberal reforms? What’s more, why did the ‘left’ of the party allow the programme of Rogernomics to be implemented? The answer is partly that the Labour ‘left’ was so surprisingly tolerant towards the economic programme of the government due to the political backgrounds of the now dominant social liberal element in the party organisation. Their experience within the new social movements had taught the ‘new left’ in the Labour Party to concern itself with identity politics rather than class politics. [Read more below]
An examination of the history of left politics in New Zealand since the 1960s shows how liberal identity politics has actually aided the forces of the right in carrying out and maintaining the neoliberal project. This has occurred in various ways. At one level on the left there has simply been a shift since the late 1960s whereby a focus on economics and inequality has been jettisoned in favour of a concentration on identity politics. In terms of all forms of social change, electoral activity, and protest activism, the priority has thus been in pushing for social change on non-economic issues. This blog post argues that this has meant a transformation from social liberalism into neoliberalism. [Read more below]
Increasingly the debates around New Zealand politics – especially relating to the left – feature concepts such as ‘identity politics’ and ‘social liberalism’. These terms are especially useful for understanding the history of Labour Party over the last thirty years, as well as for understanding the internal fights going on in the contemporary left. But just what is social liberalism and identity politics? This blog post argues that identity politics arose out of the rightwing of the new social movements that developed on the New Zealand left from the late 1960s. As liberation struggles developed around important issues relating to gender, sexuality and ethnicity, leftwing and class-based approaches to understanding and fighting for social equality were sidelined in favour of this more conservative approach. [Read more below]
Phil Goff’s recent controversial speech, criticising the Maori and National parties, has been misread as a shift to the right. As explained in this blog series about ‘identity politics vs class politics’, Goff’s speech was in fact the opposite – actually quite a left-turn. This particular blog post contextualises the speech in terms of other important recent left maneuvers made by Labour and Goff. The significance and reasons for these shifts is evaluated and explained. This left shift needs to be taken seriously, and it asks for a critical reevaluation of the Labour Party and its divisions. [Read more below]
Much of the left and liberal reaction to Goff’s speech has been to condemn Goff on the basis that he’s simply being opportunistic in his leftish attack on the Maori and National parties. This is – to some degree – a very fair criticism because, yes, of course Phil Goff is an innately opportunist politician, and because his newfound leftish critique of such issues jar against Goff’s own political history. But how much does such a charge of opportunism actually matter in evaluating Goff’s ‘left-turn’? This blog post discusses the salience of the charge and argues that although it means that Goff isn’t to be trusted in his newfound leftism, it’s no reason in itself to dismiss the shift. [Read more below]
Phil Goff has been accused by many on both the left and right of ‘playing the race card’ with his recent speech attacking the Maori and National parties. For example, on the Pundit blogsite, Tim Watkin says Goff has veered ‘in an unwelcome new direction, playing the race card’ and that the speech ‘has the air of dog whistle racism’. Idiot/Savant at No Right Turn has called Goff’s speech ‘morally indefensible’, ‘a crime’, ‘cheap racism’, and a ‘cynical attempt to whip up racism’. But such kneejerk reactions show that New Zealand liberals have largely misread the nature of Goff’s speech. Rather than playing the ‘race card’, Goff has, if anything, actually been playing the ‘class card’. [Read more below]
Phil Goff has recently challenged issues that are at the core of socially liberal politics in New Zealand. The Labour Party leader has been asserting a more class-oriented and leftwing version of politics, effectively seeking to shift Labour away from a core part of its project of the last three decade: liberal identity politics. The meaningfulness and authenticity of this shift can be questioned, but the intrinsic tilt to the left cannot. While the conventional media and blogosphere interpretation of Labour’s new direction is to label it as either ‘social conservative’ or ‘rightwing’, Goff’s repositioning is in fact nothing of the sort. It is actually a newfound expression of relatively leftwing positions on important issues. What’s more, the controversy over the speech has sparked an important and long overdue debate within the New Zealand left about what it means to be leftwing in 2009, and what the way forward is for those interested in fighting for a more equal and just society. It has made the left confront questions of how concepts such as ‘social liberalism’, ‘political correctness’, ‘post-materialism’, and ‘identity politics’ fit into the leftwing project, if indeed they do at all. Yet, much of this significant debate occurs in an incredibly murky and confused manner, mainly due to an inability to conceptualise the different elements at play. So, in an attempt to contribute to this discussion, this blog post introduces a whole series of posts discussing these issues. The series attempts to reframe the debate and the terms of the debate in a way that is hopefully useful. It argues that to understand what’s going on in the Labour Party, what Goff has recently pushed for, and indeed what’s happened to the Green Party, is not a case of social liberalism versus social conservatism; nor is it left versus right; but instead it’s liberalism versus leftism – or simply: identity politics versus class politics. [Read more below]
To what extent does the
left-right political dimension still structure political party competition in
New Zealand politics? Where do the parties sit on that spectrum? What other
political dimensions now underpin our electoral politics? This extensive blog
post presents the findings of a regular survey of New Zealand political
scientists about party ideological conflict that has been carried out for the
three MMP general elections of 1996, 2002, and 2008. Explaining the results,
and drawing on some previous blog posts, it argues that the left-right spectrum
is of declining importance in New Zealand politics, and that ideological
conflict is cohered to a greater degree by post-materialist issues. The major
political parties in New Zealand now all agree on the basic post-Keynesian
economic framework that dominates discourse and policy formation. No party
fundamentally challenges the paradigm shift that occurred with the neoliberal
revolution that occurred from 1984 onwards. All parties now agree, explicitly
or implicitly, that the market is the best mechanism for generating wealth and
distributing good and services. Within this ‘new policy consensus’ there is, of
course, room for some limited discussion of when and where the state should
intervene to correct market failure, but because there is essentially no debate
of any substance around material/economic issues, what might be called
‘postmaterial issues’ now represent the arena for ideological and political
conflict in parliamentary politics. Furthermore, within this post-reform
era political conflict is underpinned by a strong pragmatism rather than
principle. Some explanations are proposed for the rise of the new consensus,
the decline of left-right conflict, and the increasing salience of societal
issues in electoral competition. [Read more below]
The Ministry of Social Development has silently released its annual Social Report for 2009 – no doubt attempting to keep the findings under the radar. Likewise, the National Government has refrained from releasing a single press release on it (as yet). As always with the wealth of statistics in such reports, there is the good and the bad to be seized upon, and these things can be spun by the left and the right, and the various partisans in many different ways. I’ll leave Labour and National to give the positive spin on the current stats – and much of the negative material reflects poorly on the past Labour Government, for which the period of this report effectively covers. Instead, this blog post highlight some of the negative material that immediately sticks out from a browse of the report. There is one particular domain within the report that shows serious problems: ‘Economic Standard of Living’. Basically, since the last annual report – and thus during Labour’s last year in office – New Zealand became a less equal society, with increased inequality and greater poverty. [Read more below]
The Labour Party’s 2008 general election campaign strategy had two main flaws: its decision to campaign on the theme of trust (together with a general negativity), and its management of coalition party possibilities. Not only did these strategies fail to fire during the campaign, but instead backfired, contributing to Labour’s failure to remain a truly competitive player in the election. These are the issues that I focus on in the section on the Labour Party within my chapter entitled ‘Party Strategy and the 2008 Election’ which is part of the recently published book Informing Voters? Politics, Media and the New Zealand Election 2008 (edited by Chris Rudd, Janine Hayward and Geoff Craig). This blog post is the eighth of a series of explorations of the chapters from the new book, and it constitutes the original draft section about Labour that I wrote for my chapter. Subsequently this draft was substantially reworked, edited, and condensed for the final book, so please see the published book for the final and ‘authoritative’ version. [Read more below]
Which political parties had the best advertising in the last year’s general election? How come the Greens’ had such good advertising but did relatively poorly? What was wrong with Labour’s advertising? What was right about National’s advertising strategy? Did New Zealand First lose representation because of, or despite of, its election advertising and strategy? Did the Electoral Finance Act properly define and understand what a political advertisement is? Claire Robinson answers these questions in her chapter entitled ‘”Vote for me”’: Political Advertising’, published in Informing Voters? Politics, Media and the New Zealand Election 2008 (edited by Chris Rudd, Janine Hayward and Geoff Craig of the University of Otago Politics department). This blog post is the fifth of a series of explorations of the chapters from the new book (which I also have a chapter in). [Read more below]
The long-awaited publication of Denis Welch’s biography of Helen Clark is almost over. Welch has just blogged to say that "Helen Clark: a Political Life" will be out in 16 days time – Friday 31 July. While I doubt that Welch’s bio will be critical enough for me, I do expect that it will be a highly intelligent and relatively critical account. It’d be an important book, especially because, as the publisher’s blurb argues, ‘Remarkably, no proper political biography of Helen Clark has been written before’. And a recent posting on Denis Welch’s great Opposable Thumb blog, foreshadows an insightful and interesting examination of contemporary New Zealand politics – he argues against this idea that the politics of Helen Clark and Labour are significantly different to that of National. [Read more below]
The Labour Party continues to exploit its taxpayer funded parliamentary resources for the purpose of blatant party political advertising. With leader Phil Goff doing so poorly in opinion polls, the party is dipping its hand into the public purse to try and improve his profile. The image on the right is the front section of a leaflet that is being dropped into letterboxes all over the country. It promotes "Brand Goff", which is incidentally rather bland - there's not a lot in the leaflet that couldn't also appear in a National "Brand Key" leaflet. His advertising slogan is: "Hard work. Inspiration. And a fierce belief in New Zealand." I'm sure that just about any politician could sign up to such a slogan. But added to the selling of Brand Goff is of course, "Brand Labour", along with its well proportioned party logo on the front. It's hard to believe that anyone could look at such an expensive leaflet and not think that it's basic party electioneering instead of carrying out any sort of parliamentary function. Of course, the leaflet does include a section professing to ask for public feedback, but this too is just a ruse to make it seem more parliamentary while also harvesting elector data for future political direct marketing. [See the full Labour Party leaflet below]
The NewLabour Party (NLP) was very much a ‘splinter party’, being formed from forces within the Labour Party. The fact that the Labour Party underwent such a transformation in the 1980s made it almost inevitable that some significant leftwing opposition, like the NLP, would emerge to challenge the Labour Government’s free market reforms. What was surprising was that it took so long to emerge. This blog post – in a series marking the 20th anniversary of the founding of the NLP – looks at the origins of the split, political forces emerging in resistance outside of Labour, and the rise of the NLP Jim Anderton. [Read more below].
The origins of the NewLabour Party (NLP) are obviously closely linked to the history of the New Zealand Labour Party. Since, in a sense the NewLabour Party attempted to represent the continuation of the tradition of earlier Labour Party governments, examining the history of the Labour Party allows an insight into possible explanations for the later transformation of NewLabour. In many ways the history of the Labour Party provides a classic example of social democratic deradicalisation. Labour’s story contains both the confirmation of social democracy’s deradicalisation trend and a partial explanation for that trend. This post continues the series on the history of the NLP, using research carried out on this political project back in 1995. [Read more below]
The Labour Party received nearly $500,000 in donations of more than $10,000 in 2008 – significantly more than National, which declared a total of about $207,000. This is according to the figures just made public by the Electoral Comission (available here), and dealt with by an article in the Herald today (see: Artists feature in Labour's $500,000 list of election donations). It seems therefore that despite the common myth of the Labour Party being financially poor and the National Party being the party of big wealth, Labour is still just as much a big money party as National. After all Labour has been the biggest spending party for the last few general elections. And if you add up all the declared donations made to the Electoral Commission since it was made mandatory in 2006, you’ll find that Labour and National have received virtually the same amounts. My quick calculations (which I’ll check and update at some stage) show that over the 1996 to 2008 period, Labour has declared donations of about $5,321,000 and National has declared about 5,484,000.
Every year the European Journal of Political Research publishes a political date yearbook which gives a review of politics in a number of western countries. I contribute the section on New Zealand to the journal – last year’s publication on New Zealand politics in 2007 can be read here. Below is the first draft of my review of New Zealand politics in 2008. It still requires a bit of abridging and editing, and as always I’m interested in feedback and suggestions, which you can leave in the comments section or email me (edwards.bryceATgmail.com). [Read more below]
Chris Trotter paints a very dark picture of the political health of the Labour Party in his From the Left column today. Not only has the Auckland Labour Party membership plummeted below 2,000, but the party is also now a ‘democracy-free-zone’ that is ‘at serious risk of imploding under the weight of its own extraordinary timidity’. In his column, entitled, 'Labour: Political Party or Cosy Club?', Trotter pays particular attention to the political nature of the new party president, Andrew Little, who he characterizes as a friend of business who is ‘as exciting as a wet week in August’. [Read more below]
While it might sometimes appear that the Drinking Liberally political project has been hijacked in New Zealand by the Labour and Green parties for their own partisan purposes, it doesn’t have to be that way. In Dunedin we’re lucky enough to be starting our branch of the project (Tuesday 7pm, Velvet Underground), and hopefully we can be sure not to let its potential be siphoned off by politicians for their blatant permanent electioneering. If the project is to survive as a credible and useful project for the left, it needs to be protected from such partisan abuse and top down elitist speech making from MPs and party hacks. After all the Drinking Liberally project imported from the US is a potentially exciting development for politics in New Zealand – or at least for the small politerrati involved in activism, blogging, etc – as well as also for the search for new ways of ‘doing politics’. Yet there are a number of significant problems with the project – many relating to the highly contested definition of the term ‘liberal’. [Read more below]
Whatever happened to student protest? This is the question asked in the latest edition of the University of Otago Magazine (‘A magazine for alumni and friends of the University of Otago’). Although there’s still occasional protest on campus, the article points out that these only tend to be about ‘student issues’ by ‘groups interested purely in their bank balances or banned substances’ and wider political issues are no longer up for challenge or championing. The last big ‘wider issue’ protests on campus were back in 1981 against the Springbok tour. It seems that while university students used to be in the forefront of demanding radical social change, they appear to be are increasingly conservative or apathetic. This blog post gives further details of the Otago Magazine article, and draws on a previous blog post on The rise of the young fogiesto argue that amongst explanations for the depoliticisation of students, the dire state of the New Zealand left should play a big part. Any reluctance by students to be swept up in any cause should be situated in the general death of radical and anti-establishment politics. So while it might seem that the problem of student apathy and conservatism is partly due to an increase in selfishness and shallowness in youth, the left really need to take some of the blame for killing of the political passion of youth. [Read more below]
Alongside axing the awful Electoral Finance Act (EFA), the new National Government has also axed the supposedly more credible electoral and political finance review, which included a so-called Expert Panel and Citizens’ Forum. This blog post examines what was behind the review, and why the exercise was always going to be more about window dressing than democracy. Although expert panels and citizens’ forums are not without merit, when compared to similar exercises carried out elsewhere, the planned Labour-Green model for New Zealand was designed to be incredibly weak and undemocratic. What’s more the process by which it was brought about was just as poor as the one that produced the EFA. The National Party campaigned on axing both of these, and is now well within its right to do that. [Read more below]
Prof Jack Vowles used to be New Zealand’s preeminent political sociologist, but has recently left the University of Auckland for the UK’s University of Exeter. He’s still analyzing New Zealand politics, however, and has written a review of ‘The 2008 General Election in New Zealand’ (to be published in an upcoming edition of Electoral Studies). You can download a PDF of the paper from his website. Vowles’ paper is a good solid descriptive account of last year’s election, but it also contains the following more analytical points. [Read more below].
There’s been very little insightful or interesting analysis of the New Zealand general election results from the left of the political spectrum. This is partly because much of the left is so strongly tied to either the Labour Party or the Greens – both losers in the election. However, John Braddock’s socialist analysis is fairly solid. Writing on the World Socialist Website, Braddock’s article Labour government dumped in New Zealand elections is a hard-hitting explanation of Labour’s loss, which he explains as a clear ‘clear repudiation of Labour and its pro-business orientation by significant layers of the working class’. [Read more below]
