liberation

Ministry of Justice political finance submissions due

The Ministry of Justice is inviting public submissions on its ‘Electoral Finance Reform Issues Paper’, and the deadline is tomorrow (Friday 26 June). The Ministry has a poor record of involvement in political finance issues, and this latest exercise continues in that fashion. The Issues Paper is rather substandard in quality, displays a poor understanding of the issues, and is not a particularly adequate basis for beginning an attempted programme of reform. I’ll outline some of the problems with the Issues Paper in a future blog post. I’ll also upload my submission on the paper once I’ve written it – I’ve only just had a chance to read the paper. You can download a PDF of the Issues Paper here, from the Ministry’s Electoral Finance Reform sub-site. Not surprisingly, however, the Ministry don't make it entirely clear that they want submissions to be made in a special purpose submission form and it hasn't exactly been easy to find the actual form - a Word version of the submission form is here.

‘A far-left social libertarian’

As someone who is highly interested in political ideology and ways of conceptualizing and explaining politics, I’m an enthusiast for the various online political ideological spectrum tests around. Although hardly perfect, they are useful mechanisms for helping us understand politics and comparative political issues – especially because they often allow for more complexity than just the simple – yet important – left-right dimension. I recently took the test at the gotoquiz.com’s Political Spectrum Quiz, and it turns out that I can be categorized as ‘a far-left social libertarian’ - Left: 7.7, Libertarian: 7.11. [Read more below]

A critique of the Greens’ political finance disclosure

The Green Party has long posed as the ‘party of political honesty’ and of political finance transparency. Green politicians love to repeat the metaphor that ‘sunlight is the best disinfectant’ for political finance corruption. Yet although they have often demanded somewhat draconian transparency when it comes to the private finances of other parties, when it comes to their own sources of public finance – particularly their reliance on backdoor parliamentary state funding – the Greens prefer opaqueness and obfuscation. It should not be surprising therefore that the Green Party response to increasing public concern about the use by politicians of taxpayer resources and expenses has been worse than useless. Rather than helping ‘open the books’ as the party promised, the Greens have disingenuously attempted to limit public knowledge of MP expenses and parliamentary budgets. Not only has the party only provided very limited information about its use of parliamentary funding, but the model that the Greens have put forward for disclosure actually attempts to quell the growing public concern about political corruption while also confusing the issue and robbing the public of their right to know how politicians spend public money on themselves. The following critique of the Green Party’s recent political finance disclosure argues that there should be maximum transparency for the use of parliamentary funding and that the reason the Greens are doing their best to limit the books being opened is because that party has the most to lose from parliamentary transparency. [Read more below]

The politics of Chris Knox

The news that New Zealand artist and social commentator Chris Knox has suffered a serious stroke is incredibly sad to hear. As a sort of tribute to Knox, I thought I’d post the responses that he wrote to a political questionnaire that I asked him to fill in about 15 years ago for a leftwing magazine. The content is a bit dated now, of course, but gives a good idea as to the interesting politics of this important leftwing New Zealander. Although in recent years, Knox has been rather soft on the Labour Party, his answers to the questionnaire indicate a rather critical and politically sophisticated punk. [Read more below]

[NewLabour Party history] 26: Conclusions (and bibliography)

The formation of the NLP appeared to represent the beginning of a radical or left-orientated realignment in the New Zealand political landscape. Rather than being merely a product of Jim Anderton’s personal dissatisfaction with the course of the Fourth Labour Government — as the media tended to portray the NLP — the establishment of this new party represented the rejection of neoliberal economic policies by a section of traditional Labour voters, and elements of both the far-left and new social movements. [Read more below]

[NewLabour Party history] 25: The cross-class basis of the Alliance and its consequences

The rightward shift of the NewLabour Party (NLP) that — as I have described it in the previous blog posts, mirrored a similar evolution of the Labour Party  — is closely linked to a shift in class orientation, which is a process that again mirrored Labour’s own. In the case of the NLP, the watershed point was the formation of the Alliance, a multi-class electoral coalition. Thus, policy evolution, to an important degree, reflects class orientation. [Read more below]

[NewLabour Party history] 24: Resistance to party change

Just as in the 1980s, when some members of the New Zealand Labour Party resisted what they saw as the corruption Labour’s traditional ideals and the rightward transformation of the party under the parliamentary leadership of the Fourth Labour government, substantial numbers of NewLabour Party (NLP) members attempted to resist the NLP’s shift towards the right in the ideological spectrum. To do this they had to fight against the attempts to suppress dissent, and had to choose between tactics of 'voice' or 'exit'. [Read more below]

[NewLabour Party history] 23: The Alliance oligarchy

In the short history of the NewLabour Party (NLP) and Alliance, the conservative and rightward political developments were paralleled by comparative organisational tendencies towards oligarchy. During their short existence, both parties undoubtedly displayed a concentration and consolidation of power within the leadership, as the Anderton group came to dominate both. As one senior member of the NLP said about working inside the Alliance: ‘Its just like in the old Labour Party again. People get power and they want more of it’ (Interview). According to Robert Michels, the writer of Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy, an influential book about the Social Democratic Party of Germany, the rightward drift of parties usually goes hand-in-hand with organisational tendencies towards an increasingly narrow distribution of internal political power. [Read more below]

[NewLabour Party history] 22: The Alliance’s orientation to the economic system

Social democratic parties have traditionally occupied an ambiguous position in relation to the economic system. While maintaining various degrees of opposition to the consequences of capitalism, they agree to work within the framework of capitalism and bourgeois democratic institutions. Such ‘State socialists imply that although class conflict, economic crisis, exploitation and poverty are consequences of capitalism, they can be eliminated (through state action) while capital remains’ (Allen et al., 1978: p.24). Operating within this framework, such parties continually adjust to the constraints of that environment. [Read more below]

[NewLabour Party history] 21: A shift to the right in economic policy

After the formation of the Alliance, the NewLabour Party’s (NLP) speed in policy moderation increased substantially. This was largely a result of two processes: first, the pressure applied by the other Alliance partners for the NLP to drop its own more radical policies, and second, the NLP’s desire to keep the coalition together, which inevitably meant compromising on its own policies. Furthermore, involvement in the Alliance now gave the Anderton group in the NLP more power and influence through uniting with their more conservative allies in the other Alliance parties against the NLP leftwing. [Read more below]

[NewLabour Party history] 20: The success of the Alliance

During the early formation period of the Alliance, public opinion polls gave the as-yet-unformed coalition percentage ratings in the mid-30s. These results were largely illusionary, as some sections of the public which were probably outside of the Alliance’s potential support-base simply flirted with the novelty of the new coalition. Yet it still indicated that the Alliance was likely to be a substantial political force in at least the short-term future. [Read more below]

[NewLabour Party history] 19: Principle and pragmatism

The NewLabour Parry (NLP) was born out of a rejection of political expediency. The people who formed the party perceived the old Labour Party to have given up its social democratic principles and traditions and implemented policies for which it had no mandate. Therefore the early NLP party organisation placed a strong emphasis on the fact that it would not be tempted by the methods of expediency and that it would strongly guard its original principles. But Anderton and the NLP constituted a peculiar contradiction – they claimed to be principled; they rejected expediency, yet they also claimed to be pragmatic and attempted to reject an image of idealism and of being ideologues. [Read more below]