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

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: Far more to Shearer than media-pleasing glibness

By Matt McCarten Email Matt
5:30 AM Sunday Nov 18, 2012
At times David Cunliffe comes across in the media as calculating. Photo / NZ Listener

I don’t think there’s anyone in New Zealand who believes David Shearer has the speechifying eloquence of David Lange or the intimate television connection of Prime Minister John Key.

It’s a sad commentary on modern politics that these two skills are the basic prerequisites of any successful political leader. We live in a media world where fakery, shallow quips and acting skills are expected of any aspirant to high office.

Shearer, a man with a serious job doing real work before becoming a politician, has been a bit slow to catch on.

His international experience negotiating with murdering sociopathic warlords or leading disparate groups to reach outcomes that saved lives are not the sort of skills that the chattering elements of our political classes respect.

His detractors leading up to this weekend’s Labour Party conference seem to home in on his lack of ability to master sound bites and speaking without pauses.

For that crime, a vocal firing squad demands he be replaced by the earlier defeated nominee David Cunliffe.

I’d be more sympathetic if the tension was about policy differences. But it’s not.

All the future leadership contenders are singing from the same policy hymn book. The criticism boils down to style and presentation. There’s no doubt Cunliffe is a gifted performer. What is discomforting is his every nuance and action seems calculated.

With Shearer you can sense his real character. With Cunliffe, I can’t escape the feeling that he has the same phoniness as the Republican US presidential nominee Mitt Romney.

You couldn’t find a better example than Guyon Espiner’s superb piece in the NZ Listener. Presumably, it was timed to remind the Labour Party faithful a few days before their conference that Cunliffe is still a viable alternative for those with buyers’ remorse on Shearer.

The original Ponsonby cafe interview venue was changed because the subject didn’t want his potential blue collar supporters to think he was some latte-sipping w***** swanning around Auckland’s liberal ghetto. The fact he lives a stone’s throw from Ponsonby Rd (miles away from his New Lynn electorate) reveals more.

Cunliffe’s angst with his interviewer about where he should be photographed was plain narcissism. Not at the beach as he could be lampooned as if his career were drowning; not on a lawn or he could described as a snake in the grass.

A satire scriptwriter high on cocaine couldn’t make this stuff up.

The point I’m making is that obsessing about managing superficiality in the media shouldn’t be prioritised over character.

That said, Shearer’s public presentation weakness is real. He hasn’t understood the importance and urgency of overcoming this problem. After this week we can safely conclude he has got it now.

But let’s be fair, this guy has been in the leadership for nine months. Everyone waxes over the formidable presence of Clark. Have they forgotten Clark’s early years as party leader? Remember when she was 2 per cent in preferred leader stakes? It took years for her to get out of single figure poll support. She had to get a new hairstyle, a new voice and a new wardrobe and lead the party for six years before victory.

What you want from a leader is political success. For that you need only look at the recent polls. Under Shearer’s leadership the gap between Labour and National has halved from 20 points to 10. In the past three polls Labour, the Greens and NZ First have together outpolled National and her allies. Shearer’s personal ratings surpass anything Goff got or Clark reached in her early years.

Shearer’s success is remarkable given he is up against our most popular prime minister in living memory. I would have thought a standing ovation was in order.

Provided Shearer takes some serious time out over the summer to work on his media and presentation skills, and assuming in the new year he shows courage by promoting talent over non-performers onto his front bench, his party will coast to victory at the next election. A bit of unity and patience wouldn’t be a bad thing.

By Matt McCarten Email Matt