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]
Braddock illustrates that the Labour vote collapsed in the major working class centres:
A survey of voting figures in “heartland” Labour seats underscores this assessment. In the main city of Auckland, Labour lost 9,500 votes in the “safe” Mangere electorate, nearly 6,000 in Manurewa, 4,300 in Mt Roskill and 4,700 in New Lynn. In Clark’s own seat of Mt Albert, it lost over 6,000 votes. Elsewhere, cabinet minister Lianne Dalziell saw her vote in Christchurch East more than halved, down by 6,400 votes, while in the Wellington/Hutt Valley region Labour dropped 7,600 votes in the Rimutaka electorate and 4,700 in Rongotai.
Despite proclaiming itself as a party of the centre-left (and sometimes even saying it favours those at the bottom or ‘workers’), Labour lost the support of its traditional constituency because in government it favoured business at the expense of the working class:
a booming share market saw business leaders boasting of “rivers of gold”, while record profits were extracted from high international commodity prices. There was no commensurate improvement, however, in the lives of ordinary people. While Labour implemented a few cosmetic “reforms’, such as meagre increases to the minimum wage, changes to industrial law and the holidays act, it did nothing to incur the ire of the business sector. As a result, the social position of working people continued to decline. Labour’s legacy is one of the highest rates of inequality, and highest levels of outright poverty, in the OECD.
Voter turnout declined to 79% - ‘the third lowest figure for the past century’. Braddock is also correct in pointing the significance of this. He says that ‘Vast numbers of Labour voters stayed at home because they felt they had no-one to vote for. Their effective boycott of the polls represented a stand against the current state of affairs and the official political set-up—from which they feel totally alienated and disenfranchised’. New Zealand politics, he says is essentially multipartisan, with an anti-workers programme put forward by both main parties:
the policies of Labour and National were virtually identical. Any minor differences detectable at the beginning of the campaign were quickly over-ridden when the international economic crisis erupted, and the policies of both parties converged to prop up the financial sector and place the burden of the unfolding recession squarely on the backs of working people
The minor parties, too, Braddock says, only offered more of the same. He is particularly clear about the Maori Party, which is often characterized by the New Zealand left as being part of the left:
The Maori Party, however, is a right-wing formation that speaks for a thin layer of the Maori petty bourgeoisie who reaped the benefits of multi-million dollar land settlements and built businesses and careers on the basis of Maori identity politics.
During the election campaign, John Braddock also wrote some analysis of how the Economic crisis overshadows New Zealand elections.
In this he deals with New Zealand political response to the international financial crisis – and in particular the bipartisan agreement to prop up the banking sector:
Labour presented the moves to guarantee the banking system as necessary to protect the interests of working people. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is an indication of real fear in ruling circles about the vulnerability of the banking system. The bipartisan support is to ensure that there is no public debate during the election campaign about the implications for working people in the event that public money has to be used to shore up failing banks.
The left naturally make a lot of protest at National’s proposed tax cuts (often conveniently forgetting that Labour was also promising further tax cuts). And an assumption is made that working class voters would not – or should not - be attracted by such promises. However, as Braddock points out, in the context of Labour’s achievement of increasing inequality, ‘National's campaign for tax cuts has only gained traction because ordinary people no longer look to Labour to improve their wages and life prospects’.
No doubt there has been other good leftwing analysis of the election, and I’ll try to distill more of these in future blog postings. Any recommendations are appreciated.
