liberation

Sue Bradford - the Greens' futile left option

The Green Party contest for its next female co-leader is essentially an ideological decision between two candidates from the left and right factions of the party. Sue Bradford is undoubtedly the left option in the contest – which is partly why she won't be elected. As pointing out in the blog post on Meteria Turei, Sue Bradford is incredibly unlikely to win the contest for the Green Party female co-leader – mostly due to the fact that she is - for better or worse - very strongly associated with the so-called anti-smacking bill, an elitist style of process for pushing forward this social change, and has been typecast as a radical ‘extremist’. In fact, the decision of who to select to replace Jeanette Fitzsimons will effectively decide the ideological trajectory of the party over the foreseeable future. Bradford is the choice of those that are uncomfortable with the party's very deliberate shift towards the centre of the political spectrum under Fitzsimons and Russel Norman. This blog post takes a look at Sue Bradford's past, suggests that the left option in the Greens will lose and the party will hasten its shift not only towards greater independence from the Labour Party, but also towards the right. It also tries to unpack the history and politics of Bradford, attempting to get beyond some of the simplicities and myths projected about this unique but also rather ordinary politician [Read more below]

[NewLabour Party history] 18: Political differences within the Alliance

The establishment of the Alliance, was a major turning point for many of those who remained in the radical left faction of the NLP. While some of the radical left capitulated to the swell of enthusiasm for an Alliance, others were concerned with the opportunism which they perceived in the NLP’s involvement in the Alliance. After all, membership of the Alliance depended less on what a party stood for, than what it stood against. Hence all five Alliance parties stood for distinctly different politics when they joined, but claimed a commonality in what they opposed — neoliberal economic policy. [Read more below]

MP expenses and corruption in Mt Albert?

In light of the huge scandal in the UK over MP allowances, it’s worth looking at how politicians in New Zealand are misusing their parliamentary entitlements. While much of the British scandal has focused on the pecuniary gain of MPs, in this country it’s more likely that MPs and their political parties misuse their parliamentary allowances more for political gain – essentially converting parliamentary funds into a form of ‘backdoor state funding of political parties’. All the parties in Parliament have access to millions of dollars of taxpayer-funded resources and budgets that they use for party political electioneering. Of course this is especially the case when there’s an actual election going on – as there is currently with the Mt Albert by-election. Hence all the political parties in Parliament will be siphoning off taxpayer resources to Auckland at the moment. Therefore it has to be asked, are all the non-Auckland MPs that are currently flooding into the Mt Albert electorate, doing so via taxpayer funding? Is the Green candidate, and Wellington-based MP, Russel Norman really paying his own way to Auckland and finding his own accommodation during his campaigning? [Read more below]

[NewLabour Party history] 17: Formation of the Alliance

The formation of the Alliance in 1991 was a watershed in the NewLabour Party’s (NLP) development, especially in that all four of the party’s Alliance partners were considerably to the right of the NLP on most economic issues, and largely unsympathetic to the NLP’s strong ideological emphasis on working class interests. Thus the NLP’s semi-merger with the Greens, Democrats, Liberals and Mana Motuhake contributed to the NLP leadership’s rightward movement. Politically, this project led to a watering-down of the policy and principles that the NLP has worked for. Organisationally it led to the NLP, especially its branches, being subsumed into the larger Alliance structure. [Read more below]

[NewLabour Party history] 16: Post-election internal reactions

Following the NewLabour Party’s (NLP) 1990 general election campaign, some type of post-election evaluation period was made inevitable by the rushed nature of the pre-election preparations and the less than hoped for election result. The party finally had real time to take stock and for some to take a broader view of the direction of the party as an organisation and a political force. The post-election period was therefore a time for members to consider some fundamentals of the party: structure, organisation, political and activist orientation, and the decision-making process. [Read more below]

[NewLabour Party history] 15: The 1990 general election

The general election of 1990 was the first real test for the NewLabour Party (NLP). The existence of elections every three years serves to intensify the selection and refining of a party’s particular policies and political positions. The election acts to test these policies as well as the party’s organisation structure including its ability to mobilise activists for the event. Elections also reassert the importance of the party’s leadership, as they shift the emphasis to the idea of particular members of the party potentially becoming representatives in the national legislature. Furthermore, because elections test the success of the organisation, they automatically lead to some sort of internal party evaluation of the many decisions that were made prior to the election. This means that elections are often substantial turning points in the nature of political parties. This was certainly the case with the NLP. [Read more below]

[NewLabour Party history] 14: Interclass support and social democracy

Parliamentary participation tends to require parties of the working class to seek electoral support outside a narrow definition of what might be seen as the working class. And, as can be seen in the evolution of the NewLabour Party (NLP), the compromises needed to gain this wide support had the effect of weakening the party’s original ideology. As the NLP moved beyond an attempt to appeal primarily to working people, its stated ideology and policies have shifted correspondingly. [Read more below]

[NewLabour Party history] 13: The NLP’s orientation to Parliament

Initially the NewLabour Party (NLP) membership voted against a purely parliamentary focus for the party. The 1989 Constitution stated that the objectives of the NLP ‘may include education, activity and organisation at all levels of New Zealand Society, not restricted to political electioneering’ (NLP, 1989: p.2). The NLP thus decided on a strategy that sought to put emphasis both on winning seats in Parliament and mobilising community fight-backs against the attacks on working people. As National Councillor Laila Harre contended, ‘It would be opportunist to expect people to elect you to Parliament if you’re not doing work in the community’ (quoted in CPNZ, 1991a: p.17). [Read more below]

[NewLabour Party history] 12: Development of party policy

The pre-election exigencies that acted to centralise the NewLabour Party's (NLP) organisational structure served also to make the party’s policymaking process a less than democratic and thorough affair. As a result, the early policymaking process acted as a crude filter on the diversity of perspectives within the organisation. Economic policy, in particular, was rather conservative as a result, with an essentially middle-of-the-road Keynesian approach adopted [Read more below]

[NewLabour Party history] 11: Structure and organisation

On being formed in 1989, the NewLabour Party (NLP) adopted an organisational structure very similar to that of the old Labour Party. It had policy commissions, party branches, electorate councils, district councils, a National Council, a National Executive, and the usual positions within this (such as leader, president, vice president, general secretary). In a sense, organisational forms and routines perfected in the old Labour Party to ensure centralised control were used as armatures to give shape and organisational form to the NLP. The influence of this established labour organisation, which had evolved over three-quarters of a century, meant that the NLP was born with a more top-down party organisational structure than might otherwise have been the case. [Read more below]

[NewLabour Party history] 10: Party ideology

In the history of the NewLabour Pary (NLP) – which this series of blog posts is covering - the question of whether the NLP would simply constitute just ‘another Labour Party’ was clearly intertwined with the struggle inside the party over its adoption of a particular ideology. The NLP was being pulled in two directions. On one side were those who wanted to re-create the NLP in the image of the old Labour Party, with its parliamentary bias, and generally Keynesianist economic approach. On the other were those in the radical left and social liberals who wanted a party concerned with bringing about more fundamental social change, or even some form of ‘socialism’. [Read more below]

[NewLabour Party history] 9: The influence of the social liberals

As well as the revolutionary-reformist divide within the NewLabour Party (NLP) discussed in previous blog posts in this series on the history of the NLP, there were other axis-lines of significant political conflict in the early organisation. Many social liberals were strongly represented at the founding conference, and were involved in several important early debates over party policy (especially about environmental and gender issues). Most significant was the involvement of activists from the women’s movement. According to Alison McCulloch, an observer at the first conference, ‘Feminists at the conference were one of the most united groups’ (McCulloch, 1989: p.13). [Read more below]

[NewLabour Party history] 8: Elimination of the radical left

The incompatibility of the three factions detailed in the previous blog posts proved too great to allow their coexistence, and the first eighteen months of the NewLabour Party (NLP) saw the far-left groups expelled, marginalised, or dissolved fully into the organisation. The Communist Left organisation was the first to be purged, after they made clear their intention to attempt to split the party. There was some debate and dissension from party members over the expulsion (Boyle, 1989), but no one outside the Communist Left appeared to be willing to support their somewhat inept tactical manoeuvres inside the NLP. However, the expulsion of the Permanent Revolution Group (PRG) in April 1990 for unspecified acts of disruption and for unspecified incompatibility with the NLP constitutional principles and objectives was not so clear-cut and uncontentious. The PRG’s expulsion provides an interesting example of the political process of the NLP National Executive and also of the tensions inside of the organisation. [Read more below]

[NewLabour Party history] 7: Loose and fluid alliances

The existence of these three broad groups of the ‘labourites’, the ‘social liberals’, and the ‘radical left’ inside the organisation (detailed in the previous blog post), did not mean that all party members were either in one or another, but that they constituted broad divisions within the organisation. So these groups were by no means mutually exclusive — there were some overlaps in terms of membership of these groups. For example, there were, of course, many ex-radical left members moving in a rightward direction. Keith Locke (pictured on the right), for instance would probably be better described as a member of the social liberals despite his former membership of the Socialist Action League (SAL). [Read more below]

[NewLabour Party history] 6: The development of factions

The formation of the NewLabour Party (NLP) involved not only ex-Labour Party members but also a number of leftwing groups, independent socialists, and those political activists drawn from the new social movements. Essentially there were three broad tendencies within the party: the ‘labourites’, the ‘social liberals’, and the ‘radical left’. This blog post details these broad and fluid factions and tendencies. [Read more below]

[NewLabour Party history] 5: Party formation

Although in early 1989 Jim Anderton was not yet offering a party which ex-Labour Party members could join, and nor was it completely obvious that one would eventuate, the defections from Labour continued in large numbers. Despite the fact that no major party figures or MPs resigned, Anderton did have substantial numbers of supporters transferring their allegiance to the new party. This blog post, continues the blog post series on the history of the NewLabour Party (NLP) by looking at the formation of the party. [Read more blow]

[NewLabour Party history] 4: Origins of the NLP

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].

[NewLabour Party history] 3: The New Zealand Labour Party

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]

[NewLabour Party history] 2: Theoretical background

The NewLabour Party (NLP) was a classic social democratic labour party aimed at the pursuit of working class orientated social change through the institution of parliamentary democracy. Although it was a reaction to another parliamentary party of the left moving significantly to the right, the NLP too provides evidence of the inability of social democratic parties to maintain their initial radicalism due to their subsequent need to moderate their policy and political strategy. The party therefore provides an interesting opportunity to examine party transformation in general. This second blog post in the series on the NLP’s short history in New Zealand politics – which contains research carried out on this political project back in 1995 - therefore attempts to discuss theory in relation to social democracy’s transformation and set up some sort of framework for understanding the NLP’s short history. [Read more below]

Summary of health reforms, 1984-2008

The Parliamentary Library has just published a useful research paper on the New Zealand Health System Reforms. This 21-page report written by research analyst Peter Quinn in the Parliamentary Library, succinctly goes through all the structural changes in the system since 1984, dealing systematically with governance, primary care, secondary care, ACC, etc in each of the many structural reforms. It points the reader to other significant policy documents, and has some useful MoH organisational diagrams, such as the one on the right ('The structure of New Zealand’s health system, 2008'). The report can be read in html here or downloaded in PDF from here. And of course, more critical analysis of the state of healthcare in New Zealand can be read here.

Labour continues to be the party of big money

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.

[NewLabour Party history] 1: Introduction

Twenty years ago today – on May Day, 1989 - the NewLabour Party was formed. This was a significant leftwing split from the Labour Party, and began the creation of a vital force in New Zealand politics during the 1990s – the Alliance party. To mark the twentieth anniversary of founding of the NewLabour Party (NLP), I’m publishing a series of blog posts on the early years of the NLP and the Alliance. This contains research I carried out on this political project back in 1995. [Read more below]