Labour: Ever heard of tactical voting?

 

By Mike Treen, Unite Union National Director

Reprinted from The Daily Blog

The vote is now so close that a refusal by Labour to consider tactical voting is more than stupid – it could be suicidal.

Current polling indicates that the Maori Party candidates have a modest lead in two electorates – Waiariki and Te Tai Hauāuru. I think that the polls exaggerate that lead but let us accept they are accurate for now.

The party is second place is Mana in Waiariki and Labour in Te Tai Hauāuru. The combined Mana and Labour electorate vote would be enough to defeat the Maori Party candidates and prevent them bringing anyone in from the list if that were possible.

That would eliminate 2 or three potential National Party allies in the next parliament. That could be enough to prevent the National Party being able to form a majority government. It is very unlikely that Act or United Future can win more than the seats they have been gifted by National.

Insult to send tour supporters

By Matt McCarten

(Reprinted from Herald on Sunday, 15 December 2013)

What an insult that John Key appointed Jim Bolger and Don McKinnon as part of a five-person New Zealand delegation to Nelson Mandela’s memorial services.

Both were members of a National government that supported apartheid and labelled Mandela a terrorist. They cynically used the Springbok rugby propaganda tour in 1981 to whip up the redneck base for electoral purposes. On the back of the carnage the tour caused, their party called a snap election and scraped home by one seat.

Labour has found its mojo at last

By Matt McCarten, Herald on Sunday 22 September, 2013

After five dark years, the Labour Party have their mojo back.

The past month of quality presentations by David Cunliffe, Grant Robertson and Shane Jones was a great success.

New Labour Party leader David Cunliffe

Day after day the media covered confident and articulate candidates espousing policies the faithful wanted to hear. The Prime Minister was pushed to the sidelines for the first time.

Luckily for the sake of party unity, Cunliffe’s win was decisive. The overwhelming members’ vote and the even higher support by the unions is a huge mandate. Even in the caucus, Cunliffe surprisingly got 16 MPs to Robertson’s 18 – a difference of one MP.

The mana of Robertson and Jones has increased, too. Robertson will be leader one day and Jones has cemented himself back as a future contender.

It was always unrealistic to have any of the three being a loyal deputy to the other. David Parker was a good compromise. He’s the brains and the policy wonk.

Competing with the Greens for the same vote is a zero game. Cunliffe is smart and knows it’s the 800,000 voters who didn’t bother to turn out at the last election he has to win over to be Prime Minister.

Some pundits pose that Cunliffe has to move to the centre. That’s silly. The centre doesn’t exist. Parties win by convincing the majority of their policies – whether left or right. If the electorate supports left policies, by definition the centre moves leftwards. If it supports right policies, the centre moves in the other direction. The centre is never some fixed point.

Cunliffe’s policies of forcing up wages, opposing asset sales, investing in public services and spreading the tax base are unabashed left policies. What matters is that they are popular and could potentially motivate hundreds of thousands of non-voters to turn out.

To do that, the parties of the centre-left have to build a machine to get the Auckland vote out. They were creamed in our biggest city in the past two elections.

Who wins Auckland, wins government. With this new momentum for the left, I hope they can capitalise on next month’s local elections.

Postal ballots for local government across the country are hitting mailboxes this weekend. In Auckland, there are hundreds of candidates contesting more than 200 positions. Len Brown will romp home, of course. The only interest is how many votes John Minto gets on his left and John Palino on the right.

The real contest is for the council. Currently it’s a third on the right; a third on the left, and a third in the centre. Most voters don’t have any idea where many candidates’ political allegiances lie.

The Auckland trade unions have 150,000 members. They have assessed all the candidates against the three campaigns they are running: Protecting the Assets – no privatisation; A Living Wage – starting with council workers; and Sorting out the Port – force the incompetent ports bosses to settle a fair deal with their workers.

Most candidates support the unions’ campaigns but the unions don’t want to split the centre-left vote. Most unions are non-partisan. For the first time, the Auckland unions steering group, of which I am a member, is recommending a single candidate it believes has the best chance of winning, for each elected position. You can peek on www.UnionsAuckland.com.

Union members of course will vote for whoever they like. But for those who want to use their vote strategically the recommendations could be decisive. Wards have an average of 10,000 union members. Draw your own conclusions.

It’s good to see the Labour Party getting its act together. Hopefully, workers will unite to win too.

– Herald on Sunday

What do we want from a labour-led government

By Mike Treen

(Reprinted from The Daily Blog)

I have avoided doing a blog on the Labour Party leadership race because I’m not a member of the Labour Party and I don’t have much confidence that they would deliver on the promises made.

In my view unionists and socialists should focus on building a social movement that can organise and mobilise working people in the hundreds of thousands. Relying on parliamentary representatives to do the job for us is a fundamental flaw.

Even if Labour’s new leader David Cunliffe was a committed socialist he would be powerless to stand up against the pressure big business would bring to bear unless there was a massive movement below to give strength to those in government who wanted to push forward real reforms in the interests of working people.

Big business launched a massive “winter of discontent” shortly after the election of the Helen Clark led Labour Alliance government in 1999. Following that display of strength the government reform programme came to a virtual halt. Similarly “closing the gaps” for Maori was shut down at the first hint of opposition and anything that smelt of affirmative action abandoned.

I don’t believe David Cunliffe is a socialist. He is someone from the right of the party who has genuinely come to question the mantras of free-market capitalism and the inequality it produces. But that is not unusual today – even World Bank and IMF economists are claiming a new found belief in the importance of reducing inequality. Their solutions to the problem however remain firmly within the bounds of those acceptable to the maintenance of the system.

And that is the nub of the problem. Big Business will only ever accept a programme of social reform that may benefit working people when they feel their system is under threat. That was true in the 1930 and 1940s. Millions of working people were mobilising internationally and usually under a socialist banner of some sort. The ruling classes got frightened and tolerated some reforms for a period. The great depression and war that followed also gave big business a profit boost that meant they could afford to pay a little more to keep the system safe.

That is not true today. Even the relatively modest policies that David Cunliffe is talking about – a living wage, small tax increases for the rich and a capital gains tax – are likely to generate significant business opposition.

The usual response from social democratic governments in those circumstances is capitulation. I expect no difference from a Cunliffe-led government. But I am also happy to be proved wrong.

Unionists and socialists inside and outside the Labour Party actually have a common interest here. This includes people like myself who is a Mana supporter and many Green Party activists as well.

The only way there would be a hope for David Cunliffe and co to stand up against big business in government would be if we had had a massively organised and mobilised working class movement that had an interest in the promised reforms happening.

This is where I think we need to look at what the priorities are that we want such a government to focus on. At the moment is seems to me that the CTU leaders are focussed on measures that can benefit workers generally outside of any organised framework. This is true for example of the living wage proposal or the idea of industry-wide national minimum standards being imposed by the government.

I have no problems with the proposals as such – any increase in income or protections for workers is of course something to celebrate. However what we need above all is the ability to organise as a class and impose our own solutions to the problems that face us.

Much more thought needs to go into what legal changes could be made that would give unions a greater ability to organise the 92% of the private sector workforce outside of unions. This includes access to the workplace and forcing employers to bargain for multi-employer collectives. We also need a significant extension of the right to strike to include those for political demands and for the enforcement of the existing contracts – rights eliminated by a previous Labour government.

(Unite National Director Mike Treen has a blog hosted on the TheDailyBlog website. The site is sponsored by several unions and hosts some of New Zealand’s leading progressive commentators. Mike’s blog will be covering union news and general political comment but the views expressed are his own and not necessarily those of Unite Union.)

Kingmaker Jones stealing show

By Matt McCarten

Herald on Sunday 8 September 2013

I haven’t had a conversation in the past fortnight where the Labour Party leadership contest doesn’t come up. So I popped into the two Auckland Labour Party meetings last Sunday to hear David Cunliffe, Grant Robertson and Shane Jones woo the faithful.

A number of attendees congratulated me for seeing the light and re-joining the party. Alas, I had opportunistically passed myself off as official media to gain a box seat. I noticed my fellow non-Labour lefties, Willie Jackson and Chris Trotter, had pulled the same trick.

The leadership fight has been the injection that Labour has sorely needed. Jones is the surprise hit, giving the campaign a flair and wow factor that Labour hasn’t experienced since David Lange entered the political stage.

Despite some in the media fawning over Jones, he hasn’t got a bolter’s show of winning. Jones knows he’s third.

But then Jones was never in it to win the leadership. He entered the fray to restart his political career by creating a new public persona to wash away the embarrassment of his early mistakes. He is already exceeding everyone’s expectations.

Former Labour MP, Rick Barker, once said to me that Jones was the man to lead the party after Helen Clark. Shortly afterwards, Jones self-destructed and his reputation nose-dived.

In the past fortnight the country has seen a man we haven’t seen before. He’s reborn. He’s witty, clever and charismatic. The Jones boy is stealing the show.

At Sunday’s meetings, before 1000 party members, the three candidates were on fire. Any of them could singly match John Key. If the three of them can work as a team after the contest they will turn the tables on this government.

Cunliffe is Auckland’s favourite son and with home-crowd advantage went down well.

Robertson performed strongly and was warmly received. Jones spoke without notes, delighting the crowds.

Given the crowd reactions, Cunliffe had half of the audience in his column and Robertson had a solid quarter. The rest were behind Jones or undecided.

Cunliffe needed an overwhelming win in Auckland to create an inevitability that he had the contest locked up, thus swinging undecided members and MPs to his side.

Apparently, Cunliffe intended to deliver an early knockout blow and lock up the party’s union and left vote by declaring his support for a living wage. As the Herald on Sunday revealed, Robertson gazumped him by announcing his support for the unions’ living wage the day before.

So, although Cunliffe won Auckland it wasn’t enough to give him the unassailable headstart he wanted. It will now be a close race to the finish.

Here’s the state of play. Cunliffe has Auckland and Hamilton. Robertson will pick up Wellington, Dunedin and the provinces. Christchurch is a toss-up.

The party overall is likely to be evenly split. The unions were supposed to go to Cunliffe, but enough of their vote is shifting to Robertson to make their vote competitive. The caucus is still heavily weighted towards Robertson.

If the analysis is correct, none of the candidates are likely to get an outright majority.

So what happens then? Assuming Jones comes third; his supporters’ votes then go to either Cunliffe or Robertson. This makes Jones the kingmaker.

I may have to eat my words when I said earlier that Jones had no chance of becoming deputy leader. If his supporters determine the final winner any role he desires is his for the asking. Frankly, he’s earned it.

No matter what happens there will be two winners in this contest: the new party leader and Jones. The star of the Maori boy from the North is on the rise.

Matt McCarten: Opposition taking too long to sharpen its claws

David 
Which shadow cabinet portfolios do Nanaia Mahuta (pictured) and Jacinda Ardern hold for Labour? Photo / APN

Herald on Sunday column By Matt McCarten 12/8/12

Spin over last week’s political polling is that David Shearer must lift his game if Labour is to be competitive. That’s true, but he is pitched against the most popular prime minister in living history.

It will take Shearer at least until election year before voters pay him much attention. His current 13-14 per cent preferred prime minister support is twice as much as Phil Goff managed and it took Helen Clark almost a decade before she smote her opponent.

It was always going to take a lot to knock off a Key-led National Party. Does it look like Shearer could despatch Key yet? Of course not.

But no single person can win government without a front bench of competent potential cabinet ministers. So here’s the real question: do Labour front benchers look like they are ready to govern? Have they earned the confidence of the public?

Labour’s problem is not its leader, it’s the caucus. The Green Party in Parliament is less than half Labour’s size yet day after day they prove how lacklustre our main opposition party is.

With the exception of Shearer and his deputy Grant Robertson, do we hear anything much from the rest of Labour? What sense do you have of their finance spokesman? It’s David Parker, if you’ve forgotten.

I assumed David Cunliffe would have been a better pick. But Shearer did appoint him to target Key’s right-hand man, Steven Joyce, the Minister of Everything.

Cunliffe must have a secret plan he’s not sharing with us because he hasn’t initiated one attack on Joyce for more than a month. He’s awol.

And what about our other great hope, Shane Jones? Admittedly, he’s sidelined but he still sits on the front bench so he should do something notable. Alas, his website hasn’t been touched since November.

Cunliffe and Jones’ lack of seriousness suggests they should recommit or put up their hands for early retirement.

So about the other talent? During Cunliffe’s leadership bid, he tried to persuade me that Nanaia Mahuta was a hidden talent and once in a front-bench leadership role she would be formidable. I was unconvinced. Does anyone outside the Wellington beltway even know she is Labour’s education spokesperson?

You’d think with all the fallout from National Standards and charter schools she’d be a household name. Yet in over a month, according to her own website, she’s put out a total of three press releases.

Even the new blood such as Jacinda Ardern, at No 4, can’t seem to lay a hand on Paula Bennett as she goes about kicking the poor. The most attention Ardern got was when Maggie Barry made a nasty remark over her not having a child.

Labour has always owned health but I bet you couldn’t tell me who its spokesperson is? Health minister Tony Ryall must find it hard to believe he hasn’t had one sleepless night from being marked by Maryan Street. I respect Street but she’s made no impact on him.

If you think I’m deliberately personalising my criticism, I’m not. My point is that most of the caucus aren’t up to the task. For example, unemployment increased by 2000 people in the three months to June. The party’s employment spokesperson didn’t comment.

Even putting aside the day-to-day non-performance, think about this. Winning the Maori seats from the Government at the next election is Labour’s key to victory. Yet its Maori Affairs spokesperson, Parekura Horomia, has put out just two press releases in nearly six months. One was condolences to a family and the other acknowledged the Maori New Year. Good grief!

Former leader Phil Goff was left by his caucus to do most of the heavy lifting in last year’s election campaign. It seems the MPs haven’t learned. Those current MPs who aren’t pulling their weight should be sent to the back benches in a summer reshuffle and replaced with the few in their caucus who are actually doing their jobs.

Otherwise those Greens will continue to look better and better.

By Matt McCarten | Email Matt