GUEST BLOG: Sam Gribben – Welcome back, Hone Harawira

Anyone who wants to change the government should be stoked to hear Hone Harawira make his intention to run in 2017 crystal clear.

Firstly, Mana has brilliant policies. Because they have little intention of appealing to the Great Middle New Zealand Swing Voter, they can be bold, visionary, and unapologetically left wing. We’re talking a Living Wage as a minimum wage, a financial transactions tax, a comprehensive food in schools policy, no GST… these are the sorts of things lefties dream about.

With any luck they will keep some of the policies that Internet Mana campaigned on, particularly the commitment to closing the digital divide by providing decent internet access for all families in Aotearoa. It’s now possible to essentially have the world’s best library, playground and work tool in the palm of your hand. It’s a tragedy that some of our most vulnerable young people are still missing out on this.

Secondly, Mana can act as an anchor, shifting the political narrative and allowing the establishment opposition parties to appear more moderate. Some call this the ‘radical flank effect’. This is what Act often does for National. With Act’s policy of abolishing minimum wages altogether, it makes National look damn near generous to slowly bump up the minimum as they have done.

With the Greens’ long and deliberate shift from the fringes, which has now resulted in an official Memorandum of Understanding with Labour, there is a renewed need for the outspoken, radical flank. Potential Mana voters will love that the party is not tied up with what they might perceive as the centre-lefties, and potential Labour voters can be assured that left wing ideas can be more extreme than what Labour is offering.

But the sticking point is, as much as it suits the political identity of left parties for Mana to take this kind of oppositional approach, a healthier relationship should be restored before the next election. This doesn’t mean that Mana would need to be a signatory to the Labour/Greens MoU, or that the establishment opposition parties can’t strongly and publicly disagree with Mana on the issues when they want to.

But to be frank, they must be a bit nicer to each other. For the radical flank effect to work, there should be vigorous discussion of ideas. There should not be any insults hurled from one side of the left to the other. 

This is what annoyed me a bit about Andrew Little’s response. Little’s contribution to the discussion was to dismiss Harawira’s ‘trash-talk’ and characterise his political record as one of ‘spectacular political misjudgements’.

The trash-talk refers to comments Hawawira made on The Hui, such as the claim that “[Little] keeps bouncing around from trying to sound tough to trying to sound centrist.”

I mean, isn’t that kind of fair?

We’ve seen Little give some outstanding speeches in the House, at party events, and to the public. He is great at describing exactly what the Key Government is doing wrong, and promoting Labour’s vision for an Aotearoa that looks after everyone. That’s the ‘tough’ side.

But we’ve also seen Little downplaying his own party’s policies. One of the first things Little talked about after becoming leader was how politically damaging a capital gain tax policy was. I thought the media he did after the announcement of fee-free post-school education was pretty uninspiring and defensive, when we needed proud promotion of the new vision. Often when Labour MPs talk about their opposition to the TPPA, they start with “let’s not forget that Labour are pro-free trade, we signed the China FTA, however…”

It’s a calculated strategy, but when Labour tries to appeal to swing voters like this, it probably looks pretty bloody centrist from where Harawira is sitting.

Harawira also ‘trash-talked’ the Labour Maori caucus, saying “Maoridom needs a fighter, not just a backing vocalist about six rows back.” Pretty colourful, but it is true that Labour’s highest ranking Maori MP is down at number 7 on the list. Hardly a promotion of Maori leadership, is it? Harawira would look at that list of Maori Labour MPs and remember many them as Labour supporters who chose not to leave the party when Helen Clark betrayed Maori over the foreshore and seabed in 2004.

It’s pretty funny to hear Little rip on Harawira like this one week, when weeks before he was talking about the respect he has for Winton Peters – the ultimate trash-talker who dismissed the Labour/Greens MoU as “mathematical crap” done “behind the voters’ backs.”

As far as ‘spectacular political misjudgements’ go, yeah, Internet Mana didn’t work. To be fair, Harawira didn’t expect Labour to be quite such a big player in that attack. I think Labour’s decision to join the chorus of screams about how terrible Internet Mana was, thus driving swing voters to go with National, was a pretty spectacular political misjudgement.

Our priority in 2017 will be to campaign for a change of government. I see Labour and the Greens setting up awesome campaigns. I want Little to be our next Prime Minister and think he will do a great job.

But all lefties can still be excited about the party that best represents the interests of the poor and the dispossessed. The party with the most radical commitment to redistribution and fixing Aotearoa’s shameful inequality. I’d like to support a party most committed to free education at all levels, as soon as possible. A party that has been unequivocally opposed to the TPPA from day one.

We don’t want to waste our votes, so we should really only vote for parties polling at over 5% or those likely to win an electorate seat. Hopefully Mana is a realistic option come the election. But the Greens are still a fantastic and safe choice. And so are Labour, if your own politics are a bit more moderate.

Labour will keep doing what they are doing to win over the Great Middle New Zealand Swing Voter. That’s the strategy, and I hope it works out for them (and therefore works out for a country in desperate need of a more compassionate and responsible government). But those who want radical, revolutionary change just aren’t quite Labour’s target market at the moment.

I reckon plenty of lefties, especially traditional Labour supporters, would love to see a lot of Mana’s policy platform implemented. So even if you’ve got a problem with Harawira, even if you think he deserves to fade into obscurity after losing the Internet Mana gamble, now is the time to celebrate the return of the left wing radical flank to Aotearoa’s political stage. We can make this work.

 

Sam Gribben is a Wellington based political activist