Opinion: Much of the political focus since the election has understandably been on the resurgence of the centre-right, with National’s return to government and the rise of Act. However, the coming political action is more likely to be on the left.
This is partly because the period of centre-right domination we have entered could be a long one – no National-led government, under First Past the Post or MMP, has served fewer than three terms in office. The early signs, based on opinion polls since the election, are that this Government is already consolidating itself in office. Therefore, unless things go terribly wrong (always possible), the current prospect is for a National-led Government for the rest of the 2020s.
All of which puts a focus on the parties of the centre-left and their reaction to a potential long spell in Opposition. And here is where things start to become interesting.
Labour, the leading party of the centre-left since 1916, is still licking its wounds after its election trouncing. Wisely, perhaps, since it returned to the too-familiar role of Opposition, it has not sought to engage very much in day-to-day political debate. Rather, it has begun to ponder how it was that after the spectacular triumph of the 2020 election, it managed to throw it all away over the following three years and end up being defeated so thoroughly.
It will be easy and tempting to blame its defeat on its lack of delivery of key policies, especially over the past three years, post-Covid, when it had the novel luxury of an absolute majority. But the real reasons for Labour’s defeat run deeper than that. They are far more to do with what the Labour Party has allowed itself to become since the Helen Clark and Michael Cullen era.
Since then, Labour has become a party of passing causes rather than deep-set convictions. It has become the captive of special interests, more focused on doing their bidding in the hope of an electoral dividend than promoting its own values and policies. Simultaneously, it has managed to appear on the proper side of all the concerns of the left, while itself standing for nothing. Hence, when it came to government – albeit unexpectedly – in 2017, it could say all the right things but had little in the way of clearly thought-out policy to implement.
The problems that became apparent during six years in government will continue so long as the party fails to develop clear and attainable solutions to achieve its lofty aspirational goals. Labour must move on from just being the party of special interests.
For most of the last one hundred years Labour has had the luxury of no serious challenger to its primacy on the left. Jim Anderton’s NewLabour which became the Alliance, briefly threatened in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Then it became Labour’s junior coalition partner, suffered internal collapse, and fragmentation (some to the Greens and others back to Labour itself), before disappearing.
However, Labour’s cosy domination is now under serious threat from the Greens, and to a lesser extent Te Pāti Māori. While Labour wallows, the Greens have been making it clear they are no longer interested in just collaborating with Labour in a future government. Rather, it wants to supplant Labour as the major centre-left party and lead the next left-leaning government.
Both the presumptive new co-leader of the Greens, Chlöe Swarbrick, and her lesser-known challenger have made the same point with equal vehemence in recent days. Not unreasonably, they believe the combination of the Greens’ best election result and Labour’s defeat last year provides the perfect opportunity to now go on and become the leading voice in opposition to the current Government.
Swarbrick says she aims to build the “biggest mass movement ever … in response to this incredibly reactionary, cruel government”, while her challenger, Alex Foulkes, says “the time was right for the Greens to displace Labour as the main left-of-centre party and become the party of the working class”. So, as well as its role of opposing National and Act to its right, over the next three years at least, Labour will also be fending off increasingly hostile attacks from the Greens to its left.
But the Greens’ strident and overly self-righteous approach is off-putting to many, so might just be enough to save Labour, at least in the short-term. Like Labour, they too have not yet seen a bandwagon they do not want to climb on. But they are still seen as brittle and untested when it comes to the pressures of government, despite their recent years as Labour’s government support partner. This will especially be so after the departure of James Shaw, the “common-sense” Green, and the ongoing flaky performance of Wellington’s Green Mayor, Tory Whanau, and its Green-leaning council in dealing with the capital’s many problems.
For these reasons, Labour may not be done – just yet. But it will be a close struggle. Adding to Labour’s woes is the rise of Te Pāti Māori. Labour’s traditional hold on the Māori electorates is over, and unlikely to return. But Te Pāti Māori may be close to its peak – it already holds all but one of the Māori electorates, and is unlikely to win any general electorates, or rise significantly beyond about 5 percent to 6 percent of the party vote.
The struggles for supremacy on the centre-left are not surprising after more than a century of Labour-dominance, and the perception that Labour no longer has effective answers to today’s challenges. Consequently, a historic transition process seems to be underway. But Labour’s struggles over the next three years will be internally debilitating and will certainly detract from the bigger picture of providing an effective Opposition.
Meanwhile, the “three-headed taniwha” National/Act/NZ First coalition will have plenty of its own problems to sort out – even after the Treaty Principles Bill.
But they are likely to be far less dramatic than the looming power struggles on the centre-left.
To my mind, the Labour Party are without doubt the party with the nice ideas, aligned with the values most New Zealanders believe in and some of which they try and implement. National is the party which presents itself as the one that can actually get those ideas working (while campaigning against them). After all, I don’t believe there is a single major policy initiative of Labour that once rolled out and operating the Nats have thrown out. Three Waters and its stupidly named replacement is a work in progress….
On the future of the Greens, most thinking voters, including those like me who have voted for them in my time, who take environmental degradation and rehabilitating seriously, they are no longer the party many, including me, can look to to force change to how we treat the planet as long as they move further and further to the left economically.
It is clearly time for a party to emerge that is truly an environmental party that is willing to govern alongside any of the ‘majors’.
They only need 5% and I’d wager a truly environmentally based party that signals such willingness would reach that threshold.
Spot on. A truly environmentally focussed party woukd get my vote.
The problem is that most of our environmental problems are a consequence of an economic system that relies on permanent growth and over-exploitation of resources — regardless of which government we have. Any ‘truly environmental’ party that doesn’t tackle the economic system that relies on that will achieve very little and simply delay the inevitable collapse.
There has been loss of direction. Or rather, a continuing failure to fully reclaim the traditional Labour values that the Lange/Douglas government of the 1980s abandoned. The ability to deliver over the last three years was compromised because they took on too much, without adequate overall coordination. But nothing could have prepared them for the sequence of disasters that struck, put huge pressure on ministers, and diverted focus away from both their individual portfolios and from coordination across those portfolios. It became easy to blame the government for the large cost of living increases that occurred at the same time. The activities of an anti-Vax lobby were disturbingly successfull in diverting attention away from their effectiveness in managing the Covid-19 pandemic. Jacinda Adern became the focus of vicious social media attacks, designed to remove the local impact of the regard in which she had come to be held internationally. It was a perfect storm. Whatever the Labour led government had done, I do not believe that it would have survived it.
Political parties differ in how they propose to cut the economic cake. But mainstream politicians of both the left and the right still believe that cake can magically grow for ever.
Isn’t it time that political pundits such as Mr Dunne brushed up on their science? Does he too believe in perpetual motion?
As I sit in my Christchurch house, wondering whether we will be forced to evacuate once again because of fires raging above us, I ponder the ramping up of adverse weather events in recent years, including of course the economic and human cost of last year’s weather bombs in the North Island. This is just the start. We’re on track for somewhere between 2.7 and 3C of global heating and the pace is accelerating. The future will most certainly not be a continuation of the past.
What is the role of political commentators – to feast like vultures on the foibles and divisions that inevitably occur in parliament, or to contribute constructively towards steering our society towards a future where our kids might thrive?
Yes Graham. It is now 51 years since the rise of the Values Party which pointed out that economic growth often came with bad environmental consequences. The tragedy is that we have an economic system that is dependent on growth. And it isn’t just climate change. Globally we have breached six of the nine planetary boundaries. The fact of the matter is that we now need degrowth not growth. The current government is busting its guts for growth and to hell with the consequences. Tragically I heard a new Green MP in her maiden speech yesterday advocate for economic growth. So the future without degrowth is fairly grim. It will happen by disaster not be design.
Exactly. The laws of physics care nothing for human politics or aspirations. And those laws always have the last word.
Time is getting short.
The kind of political analysis we see in articles like this reminds me of the way sports commentators indulge in post-match analysis. Except that the global economy is not a game; neither is the future safety of our kids.
Public voting tendencies are going to play big part in this. National is getting a free pass right now because of the election result.
Labour’s big problem, I think, is the lack of managerial competence in the people they have been selecting for Parliament. They don’t know how to get things done. That became evident to the public during the last government and was one of the main reasons for the election result. Not only did that Government not know how to deliver on its decisions, it appeared to think it was not its job to work out how, when, where and whether things would happen. That was for officials to worry about. Consequently things did not happen because when you make decisions without sorting out the practicalities first, you make bad decisions. Over the next nine years Labour need to stop selecting candidates for gender, race and sexuality and find competent potential ministers who know how to lead big organisations. I am not holding my breath.
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It is incredible that people actually believe that economic growth causes bad environmental consequences. Any visit to a less developed country will show the opposite. Five minutes thought will tell you that an ICE vehicle is far superior environmentally to horse manure throughout our streets, for example.
Ron Scott I find it incredible that you fail to comprehend the environmental consequences of economic growth. Do you really need to have it spelt out? Is it not clear to you that growth requires increased use of resources, increased use of fossil fuels, and increased production of toxins and wastes including carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide?The result of increasing economic activity is increasing temperatures, massive deforestation, rivers no longer running to the sea, freshwater no longer fit to drink or swim in, 36 billion tonnes of topsoil eroded every year, 36,000 species, 28% of the total, going extinct every year, oceans warming and acidifying, increased frequency and intensity of heat waves and wild fires, cyclones increasing in intensity and frequency. All come at enormous financial cost, Cyclone Gabrielle alone cost $13.5 billion. Our planet, which is our life support system is dying as a result of humanity’s addiction to increased production and consumption. It behoves us all to become both biologically and energy literate. There is no economy on a dead planet. Far from being superior environmentally ICE vehicles will sound our death knell.
Working on it.
Totally agree!!