Open letter to Labour Conference 2022 & what I would have done if I had run Efeso Collins campaign
Kia ora Comrades, welcome to my beautiful Auckland for your 2022 conference!
Let’s be honest, it’s been a hard 2 years since the glory of winning an outright MMP majority to the polling doldrums post Covid has plunged us into.
I could list long reasons why we have been so shit in Government and I appreciate the propaganda listing all the ‘achievements’ but if we were to be honest, every time you scratch the surface of any one of those achievements, it’s incredibly underwhelming.
We didn’t expect to win in 2017, we didn’t expect to win a majority in 2020, and because we weren’t expecting to win, we had no 100 day plan to ram legislation through before the Wellington elite bureaucracy could delay it or fuck it up.
That’s been our problem, a refusal to take cattle prods to the self serving public service whose concerns are their own fiefdoms and glass palaces in Wellington, not serving the people of Aotearoa.
Don’t get me wrong, the Wellington Bureaucratic Elites have the brownwashed Ministry name and militant Te Reo pronunciation and have their pronouns proudly displayed in all their emails, but in terms of actually doing shit for the people? The neoliberal experiment of NZ was always designed to have Ministries that didn’t do anything so that people could never rely on them.
Wokewash virtue signals simply camouflage this truth.
There are only 37 inspectors of rental properties for 300 000 terrible rentals and 82 Labour Inspectorates to police the entire work force. That’s not functioning regulated capitalism, that’s a safety net with no netting.
At this stage I’m not looking for socialism from Labour, I’m just looking for basic Adam Smith regulated capitalism!
Don’t even start me on the horror of MSD, WINZ or State Housing.
I mean for fucks sakes, that decision to stop the Children’s Commissioner having oversight of Oranga Tamariki to let the Public Service off the hook for state abuse DURING an investigation into historic abuse?
When the Wellington Bureaucratic Elites whistle, not only does RNZ jump, but the entire fucking front bench too hu?
The billion spent each year on consultants so that people like Neale Jones, Clint Smith and Davey Cormac can pay the mortgage seems steep.
We believe you Davey.
Look, I’m digressing, but our inability to actually deliver in a cost of living crisis is going to hurt us in the next election and we have to win 2023.
Why?
Because ACT/National would be the most extreme right wing Government this country has seen since Roger Douglas.
They will slash 14 000 jobs, they will amputate the Ministry of Youth, the Ministry of Women’s Affairs, the Ministry of Māori, the Ministry of Ethnic Communities and the Ministry for Pacifica WHILE cutting the Human Rights Commission.
On top of that, National will hand $6Billion in tax cuts to the richest 5%.
A National/ACT Government will be a disaster for this country and start conflict policies that could easily turn us into an even more toxic cauldron of civil disobedience that could easily erupt.
Post covid we have a shell shocked electorate who survived, but didn’t thrive.
They are hurting and see Jacinda’s kindness as a sick joke, they don’t want to hear big visions because we are shit at delivering on them! Voters want to know ‘what are you doing for me now’.
Let me sell you an example of where I think we need to go.
WHAT I WOULD HAVE DONE IF I HAD RUN EFESO COLLINS CAMPAIGN:
Firstly, this isn’t a criticism of Efeso or Max Harris. I have been friends with Efeso since Uni days and I have a deep respect for Max, but here’s how I would have run it.
“Save $215 per month while getting less congested roads – Vote Efeso Collins for free public transport”
The cost of a per month bus/train ticket is $215, reminding people they will save that each month while the wider community also get less congested roads is the message I would have rammed home every hour of every day and that would have been the only message.
People are hurting, they are disconnected, they are angry, they feel let down. Wayne Brown won because Auckland is shit thanks to decades of under investment and all the road works and city rail tunnel has made ‘progress’ look broken.
People don’t just want solutions they can’t appreciate, they want to know ‘what will you do for me this week, this month, this year’.
Re-iterating that people would have saved $215 each month from free public transport while making roads less congested for everyone else serves two audiences, those directly benefitting from free public transport and those who use the same roads but don’t use the busses or trains.
We need our messaging to tell people exactly what they will be saving from these universal services so that the can factor it in each week to their bills.
Poor people aren’t sitting around the table discussing 3 waters or hate speech or pronouns, they are trying to work out how to pay the bloody bills this week.
CONCLUSION:
I’m not suggesting that there haven’t been wins, the Fair Pay Agreements are amazing, Labour’s leadership during Covid has been magnificent and Jacinda has been a beacon of hope, but we have also have to privately admit we have failed badly in areas like Housing...
Of Labour’s hallmark policies in the early years, Kiwibuild was among the most ambitious. And it was also an early stand-out failure.
The promise to build 100,000 affordable homes at the 2017 election foundered, and by September 2019 Labour did a U-turn, “resetting” the house-building policy, dropping the target and Minister Phil Twyford from the housing portfolio.
That month, 258 homes of the promised 100,000 had been built, and many were built in locations that weren’t attracting buyers. The target for the year was 1000 homes.
…sure Labour is building more State Housing now but that’s after a Government who were selling them!
Free market capitalism and just in time supply chains have ruptured and are creating enormous economic dislocations that will bring inflation back to the West from China, if you think Kiwi’s are angry and frightened now, wait until they have 10% food inflation.
That’s why the Supermarket duopoly response has been so gutless. We should have forced a 3rd competitor into the market the way the Commerce Commission advised us to, instead we get some meaningless nothingness and pretend that will solve the problem.
We have enormous geopolitical shockwaves and an economic recession yet to hit, Labour must be crystal clear about what exactly their policies will do because voters still feel short changed from all the Transformative change they didn’t get from us in 2017!
How do we use the power of the State to universally subsidise the lives of the poorest in a way that is meaningful to them? Paying higher benefits is one way but the vile MSD and WINZ finds ways to claw any of this increases back the way they did with Labour’s last pitiful rise.
Let’s push for policies that have a direct impact on the lives of the poorest so that educational and quality of life standards actually rise. Let’s take direct cost out of people’s pockets just for existing.
Removing all child care costs pre school and after school, removing public transport costs and free kids breakfasts and lunches would have a dramatic impact on the lives not just on the poor, but for renters, beneficiaries, the struggling middle classes AND first time home buyers who are being burnt by rising mortgages.
Remove these costs by universally funding them so that everyone can share in the harvest of society.
The big promises don’t work because we can’t deliver because the Wellington Bureaucratic Elites play a better ‘Yes Minister’ routine than our team can counter.
We must frame these Free child care, free public transport and free school breakfasts/lunch changes as ‘First 100 days’ so that voters believe we can get our act together and actually pass meaningful change and we need to sell the message of this directly as ‘you will get xxx’.
Hate speech laws, a gold plated holiday insurance plan for PSA members and co-governance laws that make people feel democracy is being stolen off them are sure fire ways of handing the election to the Right.
We simply can’t allow that to happen.
We need less pronoun policing and woke cancellations and more state houses.
Enjoy the conference, I’ll see you later at the private drinks circuit tonight, you’re buying.
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They’re not actually listening @ Martyn. It’s going to have to be the shock of a defeat and the sorts of things @Tiger Mountain suggests (getting involved, protests, union membership, hassling politicians as voters, etc).
One of the problems of course is that there is a growing number of people (homeless, under-employed, trying to get adequate medical care, those battling the administrators – many of whom have set policy and are busy stroking the egos of their political masters) that are desperate. When they get to that stage, it’s often easier to just seek escapist activity and check out of the cistern.
But, in the meantime – let’s battle on and keep the bastards on their toes!
They will get that shock. They will lose.
What I’ve learned is that the old trope of ‘the price of democracy is eternal vigilence’ must be accompanied by ‘and immediate action’.
Back to Rogernomics. The party had a solid core of working class members then.
When abuse happens to oneself and ones own there is no listening to excuses or to fantasies about a beautiful future. There is one issue and a preparedness to bite whatever bullet and exert whatever pain is necessary to achieving it. ”How and by what date are you going to get us right away from this shit”? When that is answered with a reasonable time-frame there probably remains a period of digging out of how we got here. The follow-on is ”how do you intend to protect the vulnerable in the meantime”?
There can be no negotiating with terrorism or listening to the slick, plausible excuses with their vision-board bollocks of an imaginary future.
You can guarantee you will feel you are being unreasonable in taking immediate, hard-hearted action. But if you don’t you are digging your own grave.
Now all these years, all the destruction of lives down the track it is Labour again at the forefront of new frontiers of crap with the opposition at the ready to make hay, as they do.
And this time the working class must take decisive action, take the power back and accept this shit sandwich from Labour as the gift it is: the push to ditch Labour for good no matter the immediate cost. Take a deep bite, swallow and run.
They will get that shock. They will lose.
What I’ve learned is that the old trope of ‘the price of democracy is eternal vigilence’ must be accompanied by ‘and immediate action’.
Back to Rogernomics. The party had a solid core of working class members then.
When abuse happens to oneself and ones own there is no listening to excuses or to fantasies about a beautiful future. There is one issue and a preparedness to bite whatever bullet and exert whatever pain is necessary to achieving it. ”How and by what date are you going to get us right away from this shit”? When that is answered with a reasonable time-frame there probably remains a period of digging out of how we got here. The follow-on is ”how do you intend to protect the vulnerable in the meantime”?
There can be no negotiating with terrorism or listening to the slick, plausible excuses with their vision-board bollocks of an imaginary future.
You can guarantee you will feel you are being unreasonable in taking immediate, hard-hearted action. But if you don’t you are digging your own grave.
Now all these years, all the destruction of lives down the track it is Labour again at the forefront of new frontiers of crap with the opposition at the ready to make hay, as they do.
And this time the working class must take decisive action, take the power back and accept this shit sandwich from Labour as the gift it is: the push to ditch Labour for good no matter the immediate cost. Take a deep bite, swallow and run.
Putin and Jacinda seem to have the same problem which is that they do not seem to see they have a problem .I do not know how things work in Labour but why cannot they see the issues that upset people that should be their voting block.
Trevor It’s probably their plethora of advisors and PR people at fault here, not the politicians leading privileged lives buffered against hardship and isolated from the community while others get paid to tell them what to think, what to say, how to say it. The odd party maverick probably gets muzzled fairly quickly, the seat warmers sit and vote when told to – and when they don’t, a whole book gets written about it. It’s perplexing though, and bad, that when an unpaid multitude spoke out against knee- capping the Commissioner for Children, that they still refused to listen.
After the stats were revealed this week of the reality of Labours driver licence in schools policy, i.e., it’s a bureaucratic mess and has achieved little, it became crystal clear to me why Labour has achieved so in little and it’s not the ministries. It’s works like this;
Labour member or MP thinks of a policy idea, in the broadest headline sense of the word. Like a little kid would.
Sell it to the public, think light rail to Mt Roskill by 2021, light rail to Kumeu by 2028, bike bridge over the Waitemata, Kiwibuild, aforementioned driver licences in schools, mental health revival, climate change is our generations nuclear free moment, etc.
Get elected, task and fund the relevant ministry with the implementation but for them it’s a whim on a postage stamp idea they’ve been given so they have to work out what the hell was intended, design it and wildly guess at the desired finished product.
The relevant minister takes no interest in the policy from there on in.
Policy never delivered or is so badly designed it may as well never be delivered.
Labour fail to deliver and look like idiots. And wonder why.
Repeat the same cycle over again, ad infinitum or at least until they booted out. And wonder why!
It’s not rocket science, team!
The problem is they’re not thinking up policies, they are just thinking of advertising slogans. There is no intention behind them.
There used to be an image-trope of a kid wading through layer after layer of wrapping and parcel-material striving to find the present. Well, in the modern-day NZ politics game, there is no present. One team is ‘in batting’ for just as long as they can con us all into imagining that there is anything more than this. But there is nothing but pretty wrapping paper and tinsel, with a card full of ‘hall-mark’ words from some PR team.
That’s the whole game. Because game is all it is. The grand, endless game of appearances and nothing else.
100% What+Now
What galls me is when they were thinking up these superficial brain-farts, nobody in the media had the competence or political neutrality to ask questions about the detail behind the idea in order to expose them. Instead, they were showered with virtual rose petals by a fawning and biased media.
The media’s culpability is this is huge.
They are supposed to ask questions about the actions, the steps, to press politicians about reality, not indulge their fantasies.
But they don’t. They just report it as if it were a sport (with star players – I’m so cool – I talked to a star!!!!).
They refuse to do their job. It’s not a freaking popularity contest, not for the politicians nor for the so-called journalists. It is about freaking reality. This is not a game.
Respect Big Norm, as true today as it was then. A pity we are further from it than ever.
We have experienced huge under investment in many of our cities, not just Auckland, and in many of our regions. We have old roads. We have old bridges. We have old buildings.
Let us not forget here that New Zealand was once the wealthiest country in the world. That was when we had the British pound Sterling as our currency. We didn’t have swarms of tourists but we had the wherewithal to fund infrastructure, top notch programmes for education, mental health services, and social housing. We don’t have anywhere near that kind of money now. We have a national superannuation scheme with government revenue & KiwiSaver, both of which were seriously rocked during the pandemic years. Now the banks are making record profits and we don’t get to keep any of the cash because they are foreign owned banks. We sold assets under John Key. We still have plenty of uneducated and unskilled beneficiaries. Whilst workplaces are improving on their training, there’s still some way to go.