New right wing Labour Party think tank – the path of least resistance

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A lot of anger and gnashing of teeth at the suggestion that right wing Labour Party MPs and talking heads are moving to set up a factional think tank for Labour.

It’s not surprising that in the policy vacuum of the current Labour Party that the right wing would want to fill the ideas space. Little is cautiously piecing back together a fragile Caucus that isn’t sure what it stands for. Grant Robertson’s job of how to use the economy to inspire a vision that articulates a modern progressive political party won’t be done for another 12months, the more ambitious players however aren’t going to sit on their hands until he comes up with an answer.

The problem Labour faces is an electorate who didn’t care that the PMs Office colluded with the SIS to frame Phil Goff just before the 2011 election, that makes for a difficult opening pitch.

“Hi there voter, look I appreciate that you’ve elected a leader whose office has abused power to such an extreme limit that nothing short of an actual military coup would top using the state spy agency to smear a political opponent and impact an election, but….”

See, that’s a difficult conversation.

So who do Labour target to gain votes?

Do they target the ‘missing million’? You need vision and authenticity to do that, and a clear plan that is going to put real change in the hands of the down trodden and broken.

It’s difficult to read that and not snigger isn’t it because I think it’s safe to say Labour won’t be flying a red flag of revolution for the poor for some time.

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So where do Labour get votes if projecting to the marginalised is so marginal? Why those who voted National of course.

The think tank could be useful if it simply manages to gag Josie Pagani and Phil Quin enough on social issues. Cookie Cutter MPs and beige spokespeople who dress like the middle and move like the middle and speak like the middle have more chance of winning the middle.

If this new right wing think tank can be focused on job creation however, tying the forestry industry to training schemes to building state houses and affordable homes then they could be an asset. If they’re going to bash beneficiaries they’ll simply split the party – which of  course could well be the plan. They’re opening gambit will decide that.

Do I think this is a smart idea? No. I thought using MMP to create a 51% majority was the smartest way of winning, but Labour’s inability to play nice in the sand pit killed that idea off and MANA with it. Fighting an election to get just a slightly less mean Government than the current one isn’t a win for me.

Labour’s other think tank, the Fabian Society, is too beltway and not well known enough to create  the social media momentum to be able to generate the idea space Labour need until Grant works his magic, which is a pity because the Fabian Society is pretty good.

I think Labour will win 2017 because the economic slow down, property bubble pop and grim reality of those who aren’t enjoying the Rock Star economy will outweigh those benefitting. I just don’t know if they are going to be anything more than a change of management, Grant’s economic policy/vision is the one who will decide that, not chasing voters down the path of least resistance.

 

25 COMMENTS

  1. I wrote a comment to the latest Chris Trotter article yesterday, so I wont repeat it here, other than to say that a very minor Australian Party (the Democrats) once had the audacity to let its members create (and update, if necessary) its policies, which then became their manifesto for every election.
    This means it was not influenced by the rabid right wing press, or by the knee-jerk public. In time the sheer consistency of the manifesto made it difficult to attack and got them to a powerful position in their Senate.
    Commentators will say that we haven’t time to wait for this slow process to mature. I disagree. Time is the one thing you have plenty of because you have already been in the doldrums for 6 years and are going nowhere. Why should you go anywhere, when you trim your sails to every puff from a hostile press and an electorate with a 30 second attention span.
    If you have the courage of your convictions and created a manifesto that you really believed in and was homogeneous so it was difficult to attack, eventually the people would be forced to listen. Why should the public listen to the opinions of the present party, which changes its opinions weekly?

    • Dennis,
      That is exactly the approach the NZ Green Party has taken. It would be amazing if Labour did it too. As for Labour “connecting with” voters, Norm Kirk increased his electorate majority in every election by actually visiting and talking to every single household in his electorate, then DOING something about their concerns, maybe Labour need to look at what they did successfully in the past. The press has always been hostile to Labour to varying degrees anyway, so “hostile media environment” is the very first factor to be worked around.

  2. Broad church ?….beltway ? third way ? Tony bloody Blair ?

    The only reason Labour is now a ‘ broad bloody church ‘ is because it doesn’t know its rear end from a hole in the ground !!!!!

    35 years of neo liberal incursion has left that party gutted, divided and fractious.

    What an unholy mess of a ‘ broad church ‘ it is.

    • Seems to me this sudden flurry of activity might have less to do with the latest reports on Labour’s health and more to do with the Greens toying with the idea of a possible move towards National – whereby certain right wing elements don’t wish to be left out in the cold and want a slice of the action.

      • The Greens politely invited National MPs to join the rest of us here in reality for a discussion about what to do about climate change. Nothing about this, nor their choice of male co-leader, indicates a “possible move towards National”. As I’ve said before on TDB this is a smear, and if you have any evidence to back up your claim, I’d like to see it. The idea of the Greens working with Key’s National is wishful thinking on the part of the NZ First and Mana supporters who presume they would benefit from the anti-National votes the Greens would shed if they did this.

  3. The NZ Public have been brain anaesthetised and have only a shallow attention span now, with a memory to suit a vacant lot Martyn, except for a few of us today.

    “The problem Labour faces is an electorate who didn’t care that the PMs Office colluded with the SIS to frame Phil Goff just before the 2011 election, that makes for a difficult opening pitch.”

    Key’s Minister of Propaganda and control S Joyce has wiped all thought provoking Journo’s off the MSM so hence no thought here is standard now.

    I heard Key saying tonight that “it was quiet understandable that Fonterra boss has wiped thousands from their payroll toady as they face ruin over the collapsing global milk prices so will Kiwis remember key saying we had a rock star economy????

    Probably not but the farmers will as they fight to stay on their farms as the economy tanks, and we hope they finally wake up to where key has taken them to and jumps ship with Keyster & Co.

    • As they desperately start live animal exports which they hoped to do under the radar until someone told Save Animals From Exploitation who then blew it out of the water.

      The ship leaves timaru tomorrow morning 11th June for napier.

      I would guess it is going to get a very warm welcome in napier where it is expected to arrive next.

      Stand by for John Key’s goon squad to be on the wharf to beat down any opposition.

  4. The problem for Labour and most importantly the left is the media in NZ is a duopoly owned by like minded rich men who write the Neoliberal script that we all are fed.

    Labour etc could get no traction in the last election because they were starved of balanced views in the media, even balanced reporting. In fact Labour was itself at the epicentre of an election year hit job delivered by the NZ Herald and others.

    No one in our media questioned anything National did in the 6 years prior, proposed or had failed to mention in the future. They didn’t 3 years earlier either. In 2014 Dirty Politics became a macabre sideshow that took over proceedings and it was so out there and so inconceivable that any politician would carry on like that, that the debate centred on whether it was all a lie. Voters simply hadn’t heard criticism of John Key in 6 years and suddenly the Geiger counter went off the scale. So they buried their head in the sand for fear of using their brains and voted National.

    Consolidation of the media by the wealthy, cleverly delivering right wing propaganda is a massive problem in the western world at the moment. To me Labour are trying to get traction anyway they can but the truth is they are on a hiding to nothing until either they play the media’s game or there is a revolution in the media to give the left oxygen. It’s a bastard of a problem for which I see no easy answers at this time!

    • Sadly I have to agree x-ray.
      But what I will say is that if Labour had stuck to their guns and had the confidence of their convictions with their policies on Capital gains Tax, Power pricing, etc they would have been proven to be right and that is a powerful message.
      There is no doubt that Labour , the Greens and NZ First have far more intellectual firepower and creative thinking in their little fingers than the whole of the National Party rolled together.
      NZ as a society and culture is in a parlous state.
      We need strong, caring ,simple , reliable, bulletproof policy.
      Not a reef fish mentality !

  5. The problem isn’t so much that Labour is/isn’t a broad church, more a case that the deacons inside are jostling to see who gets to be the preacher this week.

    Oh and to continue the analogy, the weekly offerings taken up are pretty meager.

    I wonder if Labour should outsource its fundraising to Destiny Church – they seem pretty good at vacuuming up the moolah…

    • Because they were looking like they were going to get a number of seats with people who were going to make life uncomfortable for everyone – and therefore needed to be eliminated, ruthlessly.
      KdC’s heresies were far too dangerous to allow to be proliferated – a very successful businessman with a social conscience that’s interested in an equitable society. Far more threatening than any dyed in the wool left-winger.

    • what killed mana was harawiras’ reactionary/prohibitionist anti-pot demands that the internet party kill the end cannabis prohibition ad-campaign they had worked up..

      ..hone lost his seat by 60 votes..

      ..to dissuade me on my argument you are going to have to convince me that had that attention-grabbing pot-campaign run..(and the ensuing media coverage it would have engendered..)

      that this would not have persuaded 60+ potheads in the area from west auckland to cape reinga to get up and vote mana..

      ..as it was harawira scared them away..

      ..and some 13,000 votes went to the aotearoa legalise cannabis party..

      ..they had nowhere else to go..those votes..labour had said no way would it decriminalise pot – it wasn’t on the greens’ top ten list..

      ..and then harawira told them to piss-off..

      ..had that campaign gone ahead..history would have repeated..and that same vote that first got the green party into parliament..

      ..would have done the same thing for internet/mana..

      ..and harawira + would now be sitting in parliament.

      ..and y’know..!..i really really hope that harawira realises this..

      ..that/how he totally dropped the bong on this one..

  6. “I thought using MMP to create a 51% majority was the smartest way of winning, but Labour’s inability to play nice in the sand pit killed that idea off and MANA with it.”

    And here’s the problem. National always had the ambition to win over 50% of the vote, Labour’s ambition to to hopefully get 30% and rely on the Greens getting 15% NZ 1st 10% and Dot Com 5% (notwithstanding how they were going to get the Greens and Winnie to work together) – How can a party wish to rule when it’s ambition is only 30%???

    Even now, with some in the Labour party wishing to garner more for the Labour vote and you want them hung, drawn and quartered. At least they’re trying to lift their party’s influence or is 30% (and falling) all Labour inspires to be?

    • You’re bang on the money. I can’t see NZ electing a Govt consisting of 3 or 4 parties unless by pure accident. Just think for a moment about what was being envisaged at the last election – a combination of Labour, Greens, IMP and NZ First. It beggars belief that any sensible person could think Cunliffe, Turei, Norman, Peters, Harawira and Harre could form a stable Govt. Until Labour aspire to lifting their vote into the 40% range, and develop policies that will attract that level of electoral support, they are stuffed.

      • ” I can’t see NZ electing a Govt consisting of 3 or 4 parties unless by pure accident.”

        except for the times when that exact thing has actually occurred of course

        gold star mate

      • ”I can’t see NZ electing a Govt consisting of 3 or 4 parties unless by pure accident.”

        Um… pretty much *every* MMP government has consisted of 3-4 parties, and Key’s National government has consistently relied on support from 4 parties to govern:

        1996: National, United, NZ First (later replaced by Mauri Pacific and United)
        1999: Labour, Alliance, United, Greens
        2002: Labour, Jim Anderton Party, United Future
        2005: Labour, Jim Anderton Party, United Future, NZ First

        National’s four-headed monster ads in the last election were hypocritical in the extreme. From memory (with some jogging from Wikipedia):

        2008: National, ACT, United Future, Māori Party
        2011: National, ACT, United Future, Māori Party
        2014: National, ACT, United Future, Māori Party

        Go back to your Crosby-Textor masters DD, and tell them their time is nearly up.

      • Dave – ” I can’t see NZ electing a Govt consisting of 3 or 4 parties unless by pure accident. ”

        Really?

        Who do you think props up this current government – pixies?

        Nah mate. It’s ACT, United Future, and Maori Party – four party government.

        You were saying?

    • It depends what you actually want to achieve though doesn’t it? If it’s simply about winning and doing nothing in power, appealing to the middle for that 40% is great. But if you want to win and actually do something for the poor at the bottom of the heap, then an actually progressive government is what is required.

    • The 51% strategy.

      In the last election National + Act + Maori + UF got 49.27% of the party vote at the ballot.

      Due to the vagaries of MMP, that turned into 64 seats out of 121 (52.89%).

      49.27% at the ballot to 52.89% in the house.

      No wonder this government doesn’t want to make any changes to MMP.

      • Minorities at the ballot turning into majorities in the House was what MMP was going to fix, remember.

  7. “Labour Latte” or “Flat White Labour” style, is all I can think of.

    Maybe they can come up with a trendy name for a new coffee, that they can sell to the better off middle class mums and dads who are too busy thinking about how to climb the housing ladder, and later also “invest” in a second and third home to ensure they have a good, secure retirement income?

    Almost anything Josie Pagani is involved in is something I would not want to be associated with. She changes her talk as fast as a trend may come up or go, and those other ones have often enough caused me reason to give up on Labour.

    If this goes ahead, they can certainly bury their party, RIP Labour, I’d say. It seems almost like an intentional challenge to the rest in Labour, to join or shut up.

    Maybe we can even look forward to a National-Labour coalition government soon, representing two thirds of voters (those that bother) and made up of a similar percentage of MPs in Parliament?

    That “middle ground”, and “f*** the rest”, seems to be the only motivator for some key players in our political landscape at present.

    How disappointing all this is.

  8. Nash and Pagani do not represent me, remember Pebble and Douglas, remember what they did
    When I see Pagani speaking I get a cold chill of impending doom
    next thing they will be speaking in support of social bonds

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