Chris Trotter writes in the Sunday Star-Times that he's glad that the Labour Party stole the last election with their unlawful election expenditure - as Labour's actions were 'a courageous and forgivable kind of corruption'. For if Labour hadn't said 'Let's f--- these bastards' to the Establishment, New Zealand might 'now be experiencing civil strife on a scale not seen since the 1860s.' Trotter believes that a National government would have unleased 'a rampant Christian right' agenda rolling back the emancipation of women, reversing abortion rights, persecuting gays and lesbians, as well as Maori. New Zealand would be experiencing 'Racial conflict on a scale not seen since the Land Wars of the 1860s.'
Well I think Chris Trotter is a talented and insightful political commentor, who is somewhat uneven in the quality of his must-read journalism, but he really has lost the plot on this one...
There's a lot of more minor things to disagree with Trotter about in this column, but the big issue is his total misunderstanding of the political nature of the Labour and National parties in 2005. His reading of Labour under Clark as a return to some soft of leftist social democracy and of National as some sort of semi-fascist threat is amazing.
Trotters says that National was about to resume the neo-liberal programme of the 1980s and 90s. But National had actually pulled back from a lot of its more right-wing economic policies. Furthermore, it was the Labour Party that had actually consolidated the neo-liberal economic programme since 1999.
Trotters paints the 2005 general election as one of the turning points in New Zealand politics and society. He thinks the grand political forces of left and right were putting forward vividly different answers to the big ideological questions of 'How should our economy be run? How should our society be encouraged to develop? And how should our political system be organised?'. Yet in this election the debate and political differences were lacking as ever. Perhaps on the surface the parties had managed to exaggerate and create some differences, but all the parties answered Trotter's big ideological questions with the same answers.
A lot of the left got suckered in by the artificial differences between National and Labour in 2005. The left is always looking for bogeymen, and National under Don Brash became this bogeyman. Trotter obviously did too.
For a very good examinations of the left's feverish demonisation of Brash's National Party in 2005, see Philip Ferguson's How Scary is Don Brash?
