John Campbell: When will Hipkins stop drifting and start leading?
John Campbell’s powerful post last week is still resonating.
John doesn’t write ‘opin’ he writes ‘analysis’, and this is the real reason the Right want too censor him on TVNZ because they fear his ability to critique and challenge their political direction.
Where the bloody hell is Labour, what do they stand for and how is the Left going to fight back against the this hard right racist climate denying beneficiary bashing Government?
National’s vile and naked self interest for Big Tobacco, Gun Lobbyists and wealthy landlords is only matched by Chris Luxon’s sense of entitlement!
Winston keeps going deeper and deeper into the AntiVaxx Conspiracy Swamp Kingdom for support.
ACTS race war inducing hate bait has the kinda twang that honkey loves to do the cracker two step to. This country has a large chunk who want to cement into place 19th Century Privilege by overturning the legal ruling that bound the Crown and Māori into partnership to give meaning to the Treaty.
It’s disingenuous and plays to the worst and most reactive angels of our nature.
Doesn’t this headline sum it up?
Austerity for us.
Crayfish for them!
This is what we have become in barely 100 days.
That such malice has political representation demands a reflection on how the Left have driven people into this intellectual malaise.
So what the hell does Labour, the Greens and Māori Party do?
Labour:
Labour won’t budge in the Polls until voters some actual policy that meets their realities.
When Labour dumped the wealth tax that would have seen everyone get $10 000 tax free, voters intellectually saw no reason to vote Labour.
When Labour dumped the Capital Gains Tax and locked into place the privilege of the mega landlords, voters intellectually saw no reason to vote Labour.
When all Labour had to offer was GST off your bananas, voters intellectually saw no reason to vote Labour.
Labour either reset the agenda by holding a ‘Rebuilding Aotearoa New Zealand’ weekend overseen by Labour that brings forward the best minds in NZ to give their ideas on how to move forward or Labour don’t look like they have learnt anything.
Chippy needs to meet and hear some of the best progressive visionaries NZ has.
Māori Legal Expert Annette Sykes – No one can give insight into the righteous anger of Māoridom like Annette can.
Documentary Film Maker Bryan Bruce – knows more about free market capitalism and poverty than the Reserve Bank Governor.
Economics Professor Tim Hazeldean – Has actual economic solutions.
Visionary Revolutionary Max Harris – His vision for a Ministry of Green Works is ahead of its time.
Greenpeace director Russel Norman – His insight and oversight on how we move to a sustainable economy is essential.
Child Poverty Action Group and Auckland Action Against Poverty – They are at the coal face of child poverty and their advice are the only ones that matter.
CTUs Craig Renney – His leadership from the CTU on economic issues has been unparalleled.
If Chippy can’t organise a reset and present Labour policy that pushes for Left Universalism and Economic Justice, then all eyes turn to Kieran McAnulty to step up as a challenger to his Leadership.
It’s as naked and as obvious as that.
Chippy either generates a reset or he gets crushed in the gravity of Labour”s failures.
What does NZ Labour stand for because we have a Party that is more right wing than the British Tory Party!
Greens:
The UK Labour anti-semitism smear by Jack Tame and Chris Trotter aside, her race to become the co-leader of the Greens continues apace.
I first met Chloe in 2016 during her Auckland Mayoralty campaign where she came a remarkable third and even from that moment she was unique.
I’ve had the privilege of speaking with Chloe on many occasions and she is without a doubt the real deal.
Her intellect to connect policy to the end impact on people is remarkable.
Her criticism of bad policy is always precision targeted.
Her understanding of how the neoliberal economic hegemonic structure is built for the powerful is fundamental to her intellectual confidence.
She is one of the most intelligent MPs we have in the House right now, she’s so good, I’d argue she’s smarter than David Seymour, and I consider Seymour almost as smart as David Parker!
I don’t think the question has ever been ‘can’ Chloe become co leader, it’s ‘should’ Chloe become co leader.
Because let’s be clear about what she just called out and what will amass against her.
I’ve spoken at length with Chloe about ideas and politics and it is abundantly clear to me that she is without ego in this. She is a TRUE believer because she’s smart enough to see how the policy intersects with real people. She has an intellectual confidence because she really is a researched radical.
She sure as Christ ain’t in this to tinker at the edges.
You fight the negative populism of Trump with the positive populism of Bernie Sanders.
You promise truly free education, truly free health, truly free public transport.
It’s Left universalism that lifts all people funded by the richest amongst us.
To have that fight demands a Green Party reset in terms of tactics and strategy.
No more hugs. It’s time to fight bare knuckle and that means a total over haul of the Green strategy team who have made some disastrous calls on tactics over the years.
Remember when the Greens gave their questions to National and won’t allowing barracking?
This pious bullshit doesn’t win fights and Chloe has just picked a fight with the most self interested of political blocks.
Incremental Labour and the entire Right wing establishment who benefit from our rigged under regulated capitalism.
Stop calling it the Wealth Tax, call it the 1% Tax because we are aiming to tax the richest.
An entire raft of new taxes aimed at the speculators and the Banks and the rich need to be brought on board to lower working peoples taxes AND fund the social and physical infrastructure upgrade required.
Chloe knows this.
She is about actual fundamental solutions, not the tinkering and by doing so, she has bought an enormous fight with the venal right and self loathing left.
If Chloe is truly going to lead a revolution at the ballot box, if she is truly going to look at breaking and re-setting the neoliberal economic hegemony, then every single one of us who has ever voted left have an obligation to swing in behind her leadership, sign up and become a member and throw every ounce of effort into building the Greens into the dominant new political force for the Left.
She is the last chance of the Left having a leader who will actually reset the crooked foundations and make the fight finally worthwhile for many who are just getting by.
Chloe is the Jacinda we wish Jacinda was.
Now is the time for all good people to come to the aid of their country.
Māori Party:
They are currently playing full blown Nationalism with calls for a seperate Parliament, Prison system, seperate etc etc etc.
It’s like they want to hand ammunition to the Right and allow them to call Māori ‘separatist’.
This desire to virtue signal Māori Nationalism will be great for gaining another 2% for them, total crap at winning the majority. They are simply seeking to place unattainable Nationalistic goals before pragmatically working together.
Rawiri ‘s demand for Māori to have seperate trade deals opens the spectre to Corporate Iwi cutting deals with China for access to water. That would feel like Treason.
Too much hat, not enough head.
The Māori Party need to focus less on separatism and more on working together because it will require working together to beat this hard right racist climate denying Government.
The shockwave of naked racism that emboldened so much race baiting this election highlights how the Right wil always use Māori as a political punching bag for votes.
As New Zealand faces the absurdity of a referendum to redefine the principles of the Treaty and after disbanding the Māori Health Authority, the question for the Left is how to work together strategically and tactically to stop the Right from winning by race baiting.
I believe the answer lies in our existing MMP system and requires a new Rātana alliance.
The Rātana movement into politics in 1923 helped seal gains for Māori and Pakeha with Michael Savage in 1936.
Savage was gifted a potato, a broken gold watch, a pounamu hei-tiki, and a huia feather as symbols of the new alliance.
The potato represented loss of Māori land and means of sustenance, the broken watch represented the broken promises of the Treaty of Waitangi, and the pounamu represented the mana of the Māori people, if Savage was able to restore those 3, he would earn the right to wear the huia feather.
It is time for Labour to earn the right to wear that feather.
What was fascinating about the Māori electorates this election was how tactical Māori voters were, once again proving why they are one of the smartest tactical voters each and every election.
Overwhelmingly Māori in the Māori electorates voted Labour Party vote and Māori Patry candidate vote and this has generated the focus on the power of the MMP Overhang the Māori Electorates generate.
If there was a Rātana 2, the Labour Party and Māori Party could strategically work together and push a tactical voting plan that calls for voters in the Māori electorate to all give their candidate vote to the Māori Party candidate and their Party vote to Labour.
This would end up creating up to 7 overhang seats in the Parliament which would cement an enormous block that could (with support from the Greens) become an unbeatable tactic that would ensure victory.
If this new alliance could demand better material conditions for those on the socio-economic bottom, working class aspirations and Māori aspirations could combine to finally deliver the promise to Rātana made in 1936.
If Labour want to wear that huia feather, they must rethink their MMP tactics and strategy.
If Māori Party want to contribute and work together, they need to dump the separatism.
Conclusion:
Comrades.
As much as we are collectively shocked and horrified at the brutal right wing draconian madness that is being rammed through Parliament with bugger all over sight, can I assure you all, it’s about to get waaaaaaaaay worse once the lobbyists have fleshed their election talking points into actual policy.
I do not think we are ready for this jelly.
There needs to be an urgent political summit of the Left to work out how we are going to collectively resist this.
We are seeing a new hard right racist Government who are politically assaulting the most vulnerable amongst us so they can give policy wins to their rich mates.
They are implementing an anti-Māori, anti-renter, anti-environment, anti-worker, anti-beneficiary agenda and to challenge them will demand a united front.
Pushing 13000 children into poverty, 8000 tobacco deaths and taking thousands from disabled beneficiaries just so National can afford their tax cuts for rich landlords is an obscenity we should all be ashamed of.
This Government isn’t even 4 months old and the level of protest at the extreme nature of their agenda actually offends many peoples egalitarian sensibilities.
We are a fair people, what National, ACT and NZFirst have all agreed to is extreme and nasty.
Kiwis aren’t extreme or nasty. Some are, they vote ACT and NZ First, but National voters will be aghast at what they’ve seen so far.
This is the time for the political Left to walk away from woke pure temple politics and embrace Broadchurch class solidarity.
Our under funded social infrastructure, our ‘me first’ consumerism, our 30 years of neoliberal mythology, our disconnection from one another, our untreated pain, our lack of hope from grinding poverty in a first world country, our damaged masculinity, the intergenerational consequences of colonialism, our unspoken rage culture, our inability to express emotion beyond anger – all of this demands questions we don’t want to hear as a society.
The Right look for recruits, the Left look for traitors.
If we don’t provide people with Hope that there is a better way of being for us all, if we don’t provide vision that actually addresses the material well being of our voters, if we aren’t prepared to debate the expansion of State Capacity by taxing the megawealthy and funding the climate change adaptation, if we don’t do all that, this hard right racist Government will win again.
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Too much hat not enough head. Good one centurion.
Treating politics like a pantomime makes TPM look silly,not to be taken seriously.
The political Left is extinct; grasping at neoliberal straws as champions of the Left is delusional.
Slavery, Nazism and communism has already been abolished. Every slave, nazi or communist has to be grandfathered in but these things have all been abolished. I mean that you’re not allowed to import slaves into New Zealand. All the slaves have to be grandfathered in. Even if the Labour Party didn’t exist, slavery had already been abolished so all these left-wing policies yknown the progressive taxation public housing or whatever would have happened anyway.
Labour has not had a worker friendly policy for years now. They do the Tony Blair think of fiddling round the edges but nothing more. There are hundreds of thousands of ordinary people, potential labour voters, who don’t vote and Labour seem quite happy with this. If they got off their backsides and tried to appeal to of these people, we’d probably never have another National government.
Labour has alienated the very people who they require for their survival.
I really have to agree with that Jack.
Time to pull the plug.
100% correct. The result of Labour’s 1984 takeover by the Douglas gang and the installation of rentier neoliberalism or we make money by using money We don’t need to build for a better society. Zeitgeist In 18th- and 19th-century German philosophy, a zeitgeist is an invisible agent, force, or daemon ( destructive spirit ) dominating the characteristics of a given epoch in world history.
Rentier gains are not taxed: CGT, excessive antisocial wealth accumulation. Ordinary wage slaves are inferior.
Take the UK experience: The UK is going down because the economy is totally infected by rentierism. Every national asset from social housing, north sea oil, to major infrastructure and utilities has been asset stripped and rented back to us at extortionate rates. House price inflation has been insane! We now can’t even pay enough tax to keep hobbled public services running. We have no industrial strategy, banks just finance property speculation, and investment banking akin to gambling. There is no desire for them to lend to business as is needed. Venture capital is only set up to get a start up to a size that it can be sold off to a competitor. And investors can take the cash and run, whilst avoiding most taxes. Rather than any strategy to nurture further growth. How many missed opportunities there must have been. The government will not object to any hostile take over. ARM the chip maker being a prime example. It was allowed to be taken over at a rock bottom price just after brexit when the pound fell of a cliff. It was literally the only tech crown jewel of a company in the whole of Europe! The interests of corrupt politicians and Spivs in the City of London will always come first. The few will continue to get rich of the backs of the many. Whilst producing little of value themselves. Eventually when the vast majority are made to be dirt poor. The UK will just be a petty little country with little to offer the world. What’s being done to us.
Despite not living in the bad old days anymore, it is still impossible for Unions to cause any problems under realties First World nations now experience?
By that reasoning despite not living in the bad old days anymore, it is still impossible for Unions to cause any problems under realties First World nations now experience?
By that reasoning EVERY SINGLE SUCCESSFUL ETHNIC UPRISING OF AN OPPRESSED GROUP must have just solved every problem, and not created a whole lot of new oppression and travesty. And, by that kind of reasoning, there can’t have ever been any unintended consequences from careless over use of sausage rolls.
Must be nice living in a world which works like an imagination.
You ask @ MB. ” John Campbell: When will Hipkins stop drifting and start leading? ”
I answer: When he’s allowed to do so, which, in my opinion, will be never.
You @ Dear MB still have to come to terms with a terrible truth. One so unpalatable that you either can’t find the nerve to talk/write about or you still don’t comprehend the ramifications of the Truth.
Here I go again.
The national party was formed from two lessor parties back in 1936. Since then, the National party, like any good parasite’s sole focus has been on how to separate farmers from their money without killing off the farmer host.
Modern AO/NZ is a creation of sideways slid money to reappear as money lent back to those same farmers who created it. The perfect crime one might argue. Steal farmer money then charge them interest to get it back while, in the mean time, keep a little aside for any parasite’s troubles, hence Auckland and its denizens for example. Aye Boys? You billionaires, millionaires and foreign owned bankster confederates will know what I’m writing about.
This is where Mr Wobbly knees Hipkins comes in. In he went as a proxy leader and discovered the terrible truth. Hipkins went visibly ashen there for a while because someone would have explained to him the reality of the false economy he was about to inherit the steerage of. Hipkins would have thanked all the Baby Jesus’e’s for being let off with a warning being ” Keep your fuckin’ mouth shut!”
A word to Campbell. Aunty Campbell? You know as well as I do, that there is no Left left.
After now 40 years of neo-liberalism we have no politics in the given sense of the ward. We have nothing to vote for. All we have is neo-liberalism. We never voted it in knowingly and now that it’s in, we can’t vote it out.
Now? Today? All we have are a criminal elite who flog us to the bone to get as much as they can for themselves as we’re prepared to give them while they, in return give us as little as they can to keep us down trodden and under their control.
N.B. An example of how hypnotised by [them] we’ve become is in the destruction of TVNZ. TVNZ isn’t theirs to destroy, it’s ours to keep. TVNZ doesn’t need to make a profit. That, is not what TVNZ’s about. At this point, if I need to describe what TVNZ’s actual job is to most of you then we’re more fucked that I dare to countenance. We paid taxes to TVNZ to tell it like it is so’s we knew what the fuck it actually is that’s going on. What’s happening right in front of our eyes is the blatant censorship of a coming apocalypse.
We, the people of Aotearoa / New Zealand but specifically our farmers who are our sole source if income really, really, really need to wake the fuck up.
Chloe Swarbrick. I’ve also met with her. She is indeed ‘ The real deal’. A rare earth metal tougher that titanium with a heart and mind of a good person.
With?
who has absolutely zero experience of the real world
John’s article was excellent and went sone way to explain what we all thought must be the case re Chippy being so obtuse as to the reasons why Labour failed and is failing. He really has no mandate to be the leader at all, so it must be that ‘he is not without ambition’ the real reason for his tenacious hold on the levers of now no power whatsoever. Bug he is vain and thinks he can win on his own merits at all. So blind and he needs to go otherwise a thousand years in the wilderness for Labour. I am rooting for Chloe as the next truly Left leader. Chloe as PM.
Btw you could have added yourself to the list above as strategist to the Left.
Martyn – Wave goodbye to Chris Hipkins
Perhaps had the Labour Party had a 100 day plan instead of drifting for six years,it might still be in government. Rightly or wrongly it gave the impression that it did not know what it wanted to do.
There is no popularity contest. Labour and capital are not enemies, but partners. As long as you approach from the mindset that for one to win, the other must lose, you cannot arrive at the correct understanding or solutions.
Time to ditch the whole Palangi left/right concept for something a bit more indigenous. Up/down maybe ?
Go back to your island BWAV, you obviously hate living in NZ
The Labour Government of 6 years demonstrated they had no idea what they were doing.
They certainly don’t represent the “working man”but rather a group of academics.
Their leader Chippy becomes more embarrassing by the day.
Unfortunately, everything Martyn has written here is 100% accurate. Change and a return of a Labour lead left wing team to government won’t happen until (a) Labour returns to its roots, (b) the Greens return to their roots and (c) TPM learns to view the overwhelming majority of working and middle income classes in NZ as victimised as Maori have been in the past, and adjusts their policies accordingly.
Until this happens, the left will linger in the polls at around 40% maximum. For the left the choice is clear: either reform our parties from within, or reset up a new party that supercedes and includes ALL their policies. Only then will we have a confluence of numbers and policies that will attract sufficient votes for a two thirds majority in parliament. With a two thirds majority, entrenched legislation is possible. Without it, any changes, long term institutional changes, can be undone.
God I’m sick of the potato, watch, feather korero! Labour are weak & toast.. GST off bananas and free dental for 28 year old elites & a 400 mil RNZ- TVNZ merger.. boomer-bike-lane-bridges and toy trains. All over the show with their upper- middle class feelz.
After example of real terrorism in Christchurch and the furore raised against our good Prime Minister doing the hard yards, Labour couldn’t turn to some hopeful stuff for the peeps. Now they may find they will be hoisted by their own petard, sort of thing.