As much as there are great expectations on John Key’s statement to Parliament today, the pressure on Phil Goff is only slightly less. He may not have the responsibility of running a country, but that’s the problem: little or nothing indicates he will have a country to run in the foreseeable future, the optimism of the activist left notwithstanding. Goff’s reply needs to be a game-changer; it needs to reframe the past year, foreshadow the coming “middle year” when the policy engine runs at full noise, and it needs to demonstrate that Goff has got some game and is willing to bring it.

It looks like Labour have just such an event in mind, but I have substantial misgivings about Goff’s planned reply to Key’s throne speech.

If the article in the Sunday Star Times is to be believed, the speech’s greatest asset will also be its greatest weakness: it’s to be delivered in the first person. There’s going to be a lot of “I have failed to” and “I should have” sort of statements coming out of Goff’s mouth which will undoubtedly be taken out of context, and on a more subtle level, it will reiterate the fact that Goff is in a pretty impotent position at present. Labour is disconnected from key constituencies, and there remains a perception that it still doesn’t really get why it lost. People will more naturally associate “failure” and “sorry” and so on with Labour than with National. The task of this speech and the coming months is to turn that around, but it will be hard work to sufficiently remind the audience that these things relate to Key rather than Goff himself, given that they’re coming from Goff’s mouth and because it runs counter to the established narrative about Key and what people want to believe about him.

He’s staking his own personal and political appeal against that of the PM. It’s a big risk, but hey, boldness is what’s needed. It’s not as if Goff has much to lose, and if he can make it work, it has potential to reframe the debate from being about the opportunities of the future to the missed opportunities of the past.

L

* (As official as a 1,000-person phone poll can be, anyhow.)

Māori support for Phil Goff after “blue collars, red necks” is very low — 18% among all respondents, and 36% among Labour voters. That’s dire. (Full Digipoll results here.)

So, if these numbers are to be believed, (also with the proviso that this rot probably began before the Nationhood speech) the first part of my critique is borne out: Labour under Phil Goff will struggle for support among Māori, without serious and long-term remedial work. The two other points of my critique remain open: that it is philosophically unjustifiable for a progressive left party to betray a loyal support base and its quest for tino rangatiratanga in this manner; and that the corresponding long-term increase in support among the “social conservatives” in the working class, who were the targets of the strategy, will probably not make up for this loss (and the negative-sum effects of depressing Māori turnout). I’ll watch with interest.

What’s interesting is that Goff’s rhetoric has moderated substantially since December. Goff and Pagani seem to have lost their nerve. This is potentially the worst of all possible worlds for Labour’s electoral fortunes: they have rightly been tarred with the redneck brush, probably alienating Māori and social liberals in important numbers, but not sustained their narrative for long enough to turn the targets of their appeal away from National. Double loss in electoral terms; but I think something of a gain in strategic terms for the party.

Long may their nerve to continue this ugly business remain weak.

L

This is the theme of Phil Goff’s State of the Nation speech today, according to early coverage. And would you look at that: it’s even up on their website.

It’s a sound speech full of bread-and-butter Labour appeals, not too heavy on the wonkish details, and it doesn’t spare anyone who oughtn’t be spared, targeting a range of elites: Finance company sharks, big business shysters, benefit fraudsters, nearsighted property developers, the honours list, public sector CEOs. Also obligatory references to education, justice and community systems failing young people, which ties into a small serve for the māori party (not named) about the Foreshore and Seabed Act and Tino Rangatiratanga flag, although wisely appealing to Kelvin Davis’ mana rather than Phil’s own, which shows that while he still doesn’t really get tino rangatiratanga, he at least realises that it’s a topic to be treated carefully. Also the absence of a direct attack on the māori party or its principals themselves is a good sign for future reconciliation; an indication that Sharples’ hints of recent weeks that the two parties retain much in common have been understood.

It speaks to the continuing narrative that the government is coasting on a gradually improving economy which has turned out to be much less dire than predicted — a good choice given the same chord has been struck by people like Matthew Hooton in the past week, and playing into Key’s “relaxed” persona. This narrative will stick.

It’s a solid speech, but not a great one. I didn’t hear it, perhaps you had to be there, but this is largely pedestrian stuff, and while “the many, not the few” is an excellent platform for any social democratic leader, this needed to be a speech which burned bright, not one which smouldered. The biggest reason it didn’t, for me, was because it wasn’t clear about who its audience was.

The collective noun of choice, something over which important battles have been fought in recent years, was generally “all new Zealanders”; sometimes “(hard)working New Zealanders” or “working families”. I’ve argued before that the first (”all New Zealanders”) is too broad except as a rhetorical device, and this was an opportunity for Labour to drive home it’s “the many, not the few” focus by telling us who it stands for, to clearly frame of who “we” are to Labour, and to oppose it to who is meant by National’s “we”. You can’t win 100% of the electorate, and you shouldn’t try: if your position isn’t pissing a fair chunk of the polity off (your ideological enemies) then it’s probably not doing much for your friends, either. Mealy-mouthedness is the bane of effective political engagement.

If Labour represents “all New Zealanders” then, by definition, it represents the few as well as the many, and you can’t base a political appeal on that. You can’t represent both the interests of the minimum-wage workers and the stuggling middle classes and the disenfranchised urban poor and the sharks and speculators and fat cats you claim are leeching off them: you need to distinguish one from the other and say: “we work for you, not for those guys”.

This is implicit through the speech, but it must be explicit, and must be repeated over and over, forged as a bond of identity with a Labour party from whom the electorate feels disconnected. All the good policy initiatives in the world won’t save Labour unless it reconnects and re-engages its base, and it can’t do that until it sorts out who its base is, and lets them know. This speech could have done that, but it didn’t.

L

In the coming years, core tenets of socialist and indigenist faith will be tested. Labour, with its recently-adopted ‘blue collars, red necks’ strategy, has struck out along a path which requires a large slice of its core constituency — Māori — to search their political souls and choose between the renewed Marxist orthodoxy which privileges class above all else; and the progressive social movements developed over the past three or four decades which have produced a society tolerant enough to permit their unprecedented cultural renaissance.

The strategy indicated by Phil Goff’s speech appears to be substantially based on the simple calculus, most forthrightly argued by Chris Trotter, that ’social liberals’ are fewer in number than ’social conservatives’ among the proletariat, and therefore an appeal to ’social conservatism’ will deliver more votes than the equivalent appeal to ’social liberalism’. This is couched as a return to the old values of the democratic socialist movement — class struggle, and anything else is a distraction. But because the new political strategy is founded upon an attack on Māori, it requires that working class solidarity wins out over indigenous solidarity and the desire for tino rangatiratanga in a head-to-head battle. Māori must choose to identify as proletarians first and tangata whenua second. Similarly, the māori party’s alignment with National and subsequent intransigence on issues such as the Emissions Trading Scheme asks Māori to privilege their indigeneity over material concerns.

An article of faith of both socialist and indigenist movements is that their referent of political identity trumps others: that all proletarians are proletarians first, and that all indigenous people are indigenous people above all else. In the coming years, unless Labour loses its bottle and recants, we will see a rare comparison as to which is genuinely the stronger. Much of the debate which has raged over this issue, and I concede some of my own contributions in this, has been people stating what they hope will occur as if it surely will. For this reason the test itself is a valuable thing, because it provides an actual observable data point upon which the argument can turn.

A spontaneous interlude: I write this on the train into Wellington, in a carriage full of squirming, shouting, eight and nine year-olds on a school trip to the city. In a (rare) moment of relative calm, a few bars of song carried from the next carriage, and the tune was taken up enthusiastically by the — mostly Pākehā — kids in my carriage.

Tūtira mai ngā iwi (aue!)
Tātou, tātou e.
(In English:
Line up together, people
All of us, all of us.)

Read into this what you wish; one of life’s little rorschach tests.**

Clearly, I don’t believe Māori will abandon the hard-won fruits of their renaissance for a socialist pragma which lumps them and their needs in with everyone else of a certain social class, which in the long term would erase the distinction between tangata whenua and tangata Tiriti. This distinction will fade with time, but that time is not yet come. For this reason I believe the strategy is folly at a practical level. Add to which, the appeal to more conservative social values was always going to be strong among Māori and Pasifika voters, so the left and right hands (as it were) of the socialist conservative resurgence seem unaware of what the other is doing: with the left hand, it beckons them closer, and with the right it pushes them away.

My main objection to the ‘blue collars, red necks’ strategy is not practical — although that would be a sufficient cause for opposing it. The main reason is because of principle, and this question turns on an assessment of the left in politics. Trotter and other old-school socialists (and presumably Pagani and Goff and the current leadership of the Labour party) believe that the left has been hijacked over the past generation by non-materialist concerns and has lost its way as a consequence. I believe that the wider social concern with non-material matters has saved socialism from its own dogma.

Largely discredited as an economic system and its legacy irretrievably tarnished by the catastrophic failure of practically every implementation, socialist-aligned parties on the left have been forced to diversify from a strict focus on what’s in the pockets of the proletariat to what’s in their heads — what they care about and who they are, their identity beyond being ‘the proletariat’. In doing so these movements have embraced liberalism, social equality movements, and environmentalism, and the resulting blend, termed ‘progressivism’ has become part of the political orthodoxy, such that the political right must now pay at least some mind to these considerations if it is to remain viable. This broadening, and the progressive movement’s redefinition of what is right by its general and gradual rejection of racism, sexism, sexual and religious discrimination, among others, has been hugely beneficial to society. For reasons of principle, it should not be discarded out of cynical political expedience.

Furthermore, maintenance of the social liberal programme has strategic, pragmatic value. It has enabled left political movements to broaden their support base and engage with groups often marginalised from politics, breaking the previously zero-sum rules. The modern Labour party has built its political church upon this rock of progressive inclusion, broadening its support base by forming strategic alliances with Rātana from the time of the First Labour Government and less formally with the Kīngitanga and other Māori groups, to which the party owes a great deal of its political success. The progressive programme has broadened to include other groups historically marginalised by the conservative establishment. For Labour to shun its progressive history and return to some idealised socialist pragma of old by burning a century of goodwill in order to make cheap electoral gains by emulating their political opponents is the same transgression many on the economic left have repeatedly levelled against the māori party, and with some justification: selling out one’s principles for the sake of political expedience is a betrayal, and betrayals do not go unpunished. In this case, the betrayal is against the young, who will rapidly overtake the old socialist guard as the party’s future; and Māori, who will rapidly overtake the old Pākehā majority in this country’s future. The socialists might applaud, but Labour represents more than just the socialists, and it must continue to do so if it is to remain relevant.

So, for my analysis, the ‘blue collars, red necks’ strategy fails at the tactical level, because it asks Māori to choose their economic identity over their cultural identity; it fails at the level of principle, because it represents a resort to regressive politics, a movement away from what is ‘right’ to what is expedient; and it fails at the level of strategy, because by turning its back on progressivism the party publicly abandons its constituents, and particularly those who represent the future of NZ’s politics, who have grown up with the Labour party as a progressive movement. It is triply flawed, and the only silver lining from the whole sorry affair is that (again, if Goff and Pagani hold their nerve) we will see the dogmatic adherence to class tested and, hopefully once and for all, bested.

L

* Of course, Goff claims it is no such thing. But Trotter sees that it is and is thrilled, and John Pagani’s endorsement of Trotter’s analysis reveals rather more about the strategic direction than a politician’s public assurance.

** I see this as an expression of how normalised Māori-ness is among young people, and as much as can be said from the actions of nine-year-olds, an indicator of NZ’s political future.

In the Insensitivity and hypersensitivity paper I referred to previously, Raymond Nairn and Timothy McCreanor studied submissions to the Human Rights Commission in response to the Haka Party Incident in which He Taua, including one Hone Harawira, broke up an offensive Auckland University engineering school mock-haka (this is poorly documented on the internets, but see here). They found that Pākehā responded by conceding that while the students may have been insensitive, He Taua were hypersensitive. This was and remains the default mode of rationalising race relations incidents in NZ: no matter whether it’s having their haka mocked or their Foreshore and Seabed nationalised, those Māoris are always complaining about something.

The insensitive-hypersensitive contrasting pair is a victim-blaming technique: the assertion that while we may have been insensitive, they are hypersensitive. This is presented as a concession but is in fact an attack which minimises the ‘insensitive’ party’s wrongdoing and magnifies the other party’s ‘hypersensitivity’ as a character flaw:

The term ‘hypersensitive’ carries a psychological load for which there is no parallel in ‘insensitivity’. Insensitivity is represented as deriving from ignorance; as such it can be dispelled by information. It is to be regarded as transitory, incidental, and non-deliberate. From a state of insensitivity an individual can act in ways similar or identical to those who are malevolent but is less culpable because a plea of ignorance can be made in mitigation.
[...]
In contrast, hypersensitivity is represented as deriving from emotional sources and is thus internally mediated. Such psychological phenomena are seen as part of the person’s nature and are not easily accessible to adjustment. Hypersensitivity is thus regarded in the same way as aggression, introversion and other personal characteristics. [...] The association of hypersensitivity with emotion and indeed with extremes of emotion facilitates the marginalising of the actions and beliefs of people so labelled in ways which removes them from serious contention in social debate.

… and it’s ‘Warrior Gene’ all over again. Moreover, the common lexical root of the terms produces a false equivalence which amplifies this imbalance:

Blaming both sides, albeit one more than the other appeals to readers’ commonsense lore. [...] It doesn’t matter that the unequal weighting of the ideas of hypersensitivity and insensitivity prejudices the judgement.

The sweet irony of this device is that, where there is a genuine imbalance of offence perpetrated by one group against another, it requires the offending group to be both insensitive to their own actions, and hypersensitive to the response of the group against whom the major offence was given. So it is with Hone Harawira’s deeply foolish, divisive and unhelpful comments of late: Pākehā New Zealand took hypersensitive umbrage at the terminology while insensitively ignoring the much greater offence caused by the repeated injustices visited upon Māori. I do not defend Harawira; the purpose is only to illustrate that this remains very much the standard means of reasoning around such incidents.

And so it is with Phil Goff, who played the insensitive/hypersensitive Pākehā role to the hilt in his response to Harawira, and has compounded that ill-considered reactionary stance by extending the narrative to the Foreshore and Seabed and the māori party’s decision to coalesce with National. This implies that Labour still thinks that Māori were unreasonable to object to the mass nationalisation of resources to which they had a legitimate claim in law, and that by cutting loose and forming another party they had somehow given greater offence to Labour than the original nationalisation had justified.

The message from Goff’s Labour party is loud and clear: we make no apologies for the decisions taken while being chased by the Brash Iwi/Kiwi monster, and are now prepared to do it all again if need be. This is a damned shame for the country, and for the party. Labour had a great opportunity to mend its bridges with Māori, as the māori party is burdened with an appalling ETS and its more and more fraught partnership with National — and instead of doing so they set another charge and detonated it. The Māori electorate will not support a Labour party which has declared itself the party of blue-collar Pākehā rednecks who are sick of ‘those Māoris’ and their complaining about things which happened the century before last. Where will they go? What will Labour do without them?

L

Perhaps this speech is an attempt by Phil Goff to reclaim the term and concept of “Nationhood” from the clutches of rampant colonialism. If so, it is an abject failure. It compounds Labour’s cynical appeasement of National’s race-war stance in 2003 with a reactionary, resentful re-assertion of the same principles before which Labour cowered in 2004. It is the very epitome of what Raymond Nairn and Timothy McCreanor called “insensitivity and hypersensitivity“. More on this here

I had an incandescent rant underway, but I’ve said it all before. If you refer to the tag archive under the terms “Chris Trotter” and “Michael Laws” you can read most of it — which should give you an idea of the company Goff’s speech deserves to keep. And in the mean time, Idiot/Savant has summed up my thoughts in several thousand fewer words than I would have. I can do no better than to quote him (and please excuse the transitory obscenity in this instance):

This is the same cynical attempt to whip up racism so memorably used by Don Brash at Orewa. I despised it then and despise it now. Goff knows better, just as much as Brash did. But he’s willing to pander to racists to get a short-term boost in the polls, and bugger the long-term damage such pandering does to racial harmony.
Well, fuck him. Racism has no place in our society, and a proper left-wing party would be fighting against it, not engendering and exploiting it for political gain.
[...]
Despite Labour’s dear wishes, the Maori Party is not going to go away. Instead, it looks likely to be a permanent feature of our political landscape. More importantly, it looks to be setting itself up as the swing bloc which makes or breaks governments. That’s certainly likely to be the case at the next election, unless the government really screws up.
What this means is that if Labour wants to regain power, it will have to sit across the table from and work with the Maori Party. And that will simply be impossible if they are running on a racist platform. By following Brash’s path of cheap racism, Labour is alienating the party it desperately needs to win over. And the result may see it locked out of government for far longer than if it had kept its hands clean.

I’m trying very hard to find an image of that “white is the new black” All Whites poster/shirt with which to adorn this post — because that’s what Goff is driving at here: what you thought was colonial paternalism wasn’t, and what you thought was self-determination isn’t. It’s a disgrace.

L

The story of Rodney Hide’s ministerial fundraiser is making headway — at present, it’s the splash spot on stuff.co.nz and is pretty prominent on the Herald site as well.

This image is strong. Close-ups are rarely flattering, and this one has an unctuous, indignant defensiveness which evokes, well, just about every crooked politico in history. The text, leading with the universal refrain of officials on the take and following up hard with that beloved word ‘rort’, gives the audience all the necessary context. This is a position Hide has spent his political career avoiding, and one which he was once merciless in prosecuting. It’s a long way to fall.

It seems that the credit for this should go to Eddie, who drew together its various strands into the narrative we now have. It’s been picked up by a few blogs, including Red Alert, where Phil Twyford published his own clearly-derivative-but-not-attributed riff on the topic earlier today, complete with Goff’s press release which forms the basis for the NZPA story. And it looks like Eddie even chose the photo which Stuff ran with — only one is flipped on the vertical. Well done.

Update: Lyndon in the comments points out that the threads were in fact drawn together by North Shore mayor Andrew Williams in the first instance, and published on Scoop.co.nz – so Frist P0st credits there, although the Labour response seems more derivative of Eddie’s work than that, so my point largely remains.

L

I’m not a big-city lawyer either, but Paula Bennett might have done well to consult one here.

In response to a parliamentary question from Charles Chauvel asking whether she’d taken advice as to whether the two women whose details she revealed after they questioned the government’s decision to cut the Training Incentive Allowance could be deemed to have given consent for the rest of their details to be released by going to the medias. Her answer was, more or less, “I looked at the guidelines that were on the Privacy Commissioner’s website” and a wee bit of misdirection about the previous Labour government.

The guidelines specify that a minister “need only believe, on reasonable grounds, that the individual has authorised the disclosure”, and later admitting that she did not make enquiries of “her officials or anyone else” as to the details she released. Without checking precedent or taking legal or policy advice, how can she claim “reasonable grounds” for implicit consent from a few brief and specific quotes in the Herald on Sunday?

The problem her stance raises – and perhaps the very reason for her taking it – is its chilling effect on political speech. If anyone who is dependent on the government for any part of their income (or other services) is liable to have the details of their cases made public for criticising the department upon which they rely, then that department is very effectively insulated from criticism. Being insulated from criticism means not being held to account for failings, and not being held to account for failings leads to a culture of impunity, a central plank of National’s election campaign against the former government.

I expect there will be a few smart privacy lawyers who’ll offer their services to the two women in question for a nominal fee, and the government would do very well to sharpen up. This is political gold for the opposition if the minister does not immediately back down and offer mea culpas of some sort. If the Prime Minister is required to pick sides, this is an important juncture for the government. She didn’t take advice. She can’t know what reasonable grounds are. Being a cabinet minister requires high standards of conduct and certainty. An employer would never get away with ‘I checked the website and then fired him’. If this goes to court, it won’t matter who wins or loses the case – the government will lose a bit of its shine, and so will its beleaguered Minister of Social Development.

There are good threads about this at the Dim Post.

Edit: Eddie has done some further digging to nail this down, too.

Edit 2: Woah, simultaneous linkage. There is no cabal, really.

Edit 3: It occurs to me that this is a political n00b’s monkey-see-monkey-do response to the Burgess case, where Labour and the media released some but not all details, and National used the remainder of the details to invalidate the political points being made. The differences with this case are that someone’s property holdings are a matter of public record, not information held by the government; and even if they were, property holdings are directly relevant (implied consent clearly applies) since the issue at hand hinged on the Burgesses losing their house, a matter which they brought into the public sphere.

I reckon Bennett saw what a big win the government had with the Burgess case, figured she’d do the same with this case, and overreached. Schoolgirl mistake. But I think it’s giving far too much credit to call this a rope-a-dope by Labour.

L

Bruce the Engineer.

Turns out he and his wife have a lifestyle block in John Key’s well-heeled electorate and two rental properties, and the whole story was a plant by Phil Goff. This was a very poor choice of poster boy: nobody with a lifestyle block and two investment properties is entitled to cry poverty. Even if their cashflow situation means they’ll be doing it hard until Bruce finds another job, arguing that they should be entitled to full benefit plays right into the hands of those who argue Labour is all about middle-class welfare or, in this case, welfare for property-speculator millionaires. There is no way Labour can claim to speak to genuine need while they nail their colours to cases like this, people far better off than most of those who are Labour’s nominal constituency. What of all those who don’t have two houses and a lifestyle block to fall back upon? Honestly, it’s insulting.

Labour, if you’re going to try to cynically manipulate public opinion, can you at least make a halfway-competent job of it? Poor Bruce and Jo have been used as propaganda pieces by Phil Goff, and badly so. They lose, Labour loses, NZ loses.

Edit: Shorter Lew: “There are plenty of people for whom Labour could be going into bat during the current recession. These ain’t them.”

L

Sean Plunket delivered a stinging, if metaphorical, spank to Larry Baldock today on Morning Report (audio). Plunket challenged Baldock to demonstrate one case (just one) in which a parent was convicted of a criminal offence for smacking a child. He can’t, because there hasn’t been one. After several minutes of going around in circles arguing symbolic, rather than substantive matters and making excuses, he settles on the case of Jimmy Mason, which is explicitly not a s59 test case, since he denied striking his son at all.

What we have here is an apt and obvious demonstration that Larry Baldock doesn’t actually understand what the question means – and neither does John Boscawen. That, and the pro-smacking lobby is trying to use the referendum for symbolic purposes. They’re arguing that the question doesn’t mean what its words say it means – it means what its proponents say it means. If this was taken on by government it would be a subversion of the purpose of a CIR, which is to give the electorate a chance to answer a specific question which has clear and obvious policy implications – not to give people a chance to tick ‘yes’ or ‘no’ and then have the meaning of that response spun into whatever suits the referendum framers’ agenda. Because there is no possibility of gaining an understanding of what the electorate wants with this question there is no legitimate issue of representation, despite what anti-anti-smackers such as Dave think. John Key has seen this, and has wisely refused to allow his government to be hijacked by populist propagandists with an incomplete grasp of either the issues or the process; that is, people who figure that belief and ideology are all that matter.

Larry Baldock also reveals his larger purpose here, which is to establish himself and the Kiwi Party as NZ’s next populist vehicle, exploiting the vacuum left by Winston Peters’ absence. He started by talking about how both Phil Goff and John Key are “part of the problem” for supposedly ignoring the electorate, and finished this interview, in which he made no substantive points whatsoever in support of his case, with a petulant “the next-best referendum will be the elections in 2011″, a somewhat weak variation on “the eternal court of history will absolve me” which calls on people who believe that both Labour and National are the problem to vote for him.

Well, Larry, we’ll see. You’re no Winston. Perhaps you can sign Michael Laws up; you could use his political competence.

L