Just Left

A huge job; learning from the Nats - #labourleader

This post canvasses the huge job facing Labour's next leadership, and learns a few lessons from National's recent history.

 

A huge job.

It's hard to get your head around the scale of the task the next leadership team in the Labour Party faces.

At the core of the job is to create and communicate an alternative to recession economics as preached by Key and English, and to build a hopeful narrative of change and growth to counterpoint the fear/debt mix deployed so effectively by National this year.

They need to work out the ways to get that across to people who do or might vote Labour, and to maintain those messages and narratives for the whole three years, to create a climate where people want to change.

Doing the hard grunt analysis and policy work, and getting the message right, requires smart thinking and broad engagement with what's happening locally and globally. It requires great research and insight.  Fantastic political judgement, and a ruthless determination to apply our values to today, not yesterday.

The new team will need to do and talk about politics sufficiently differently that the little sparkle of interest created by the current leadership race in Labour's future carries on into the new year, and builds new membership and activism in the Party.

They need to work with the New Zealand Council see through a successful programme of reform that improves Labour's ability to organise.  That requires members/supporters and money to drive more voter contact and voter persuasion.  The reform programme also needs to improve the role of members in the party, and improve candidate selection.

They need to fend off the political depradations of NZ First to the right, and the Greens to the left; animate and energise Labour's base; and then reach out and be open to securing the votes of middle of the road voters who chose to stay with National.

They will need to pull every single Labour MP into roles they are well suited to, as spokespeople, organisers, and supporters of change throughout the Labour Party.

It's one hell of a job. 

Of all these things, I think the most important is the first one. If we don't have a credible programme of reform that can actually make people better off, then we won't be able to build the politics around it to win.

And, to be frank, it'll not be much worth winning if all we do is continue to make life worse for most people, which is exactly what National's policy framework of failure is going to do in 2011-2014.

 

Learning from the Nats.

There's the other angle too, to learn from our opponents.

Think about how Key got to where he is today.

With his attractive back story, he entered Parliament in 2002 and was finance spokesman in time to really take on (and in some ways beat) Cullen during the 2005 campaign. 

While he was doing that, the National Party organisation was restructuring itself into a far more effective body, with improved internal governance and so on.

A leader who could motivate the base was in place, leading to a sharply higher vote in 2005 and massive flows of money and membership. 

Simultaneously, despite Brash's inclinations, National was ditching the far right policies of the late 1990s and starting to talk about issues that mattered to voters.

Then Key took over in 2006, moderated further, ran a relatively unified caucus on top of a well-resourced party, and took on Clark at the end of a long Labour government as a fresh and positive face flying into dark and stormy times.

The point I suppose I am making is that the successful thing about Key isn't only his back story.  That helped voters listen to him and still does.  But he is a success because of all the other things - successful reform, big well resourced party, ideas in touch with the times.

That is why I said in my last post that we need to change, and change big time.  It's why I said there is no silver bullet in a particular leader.

We remain lucky that in the Davids, we have people who can do many of these things. I refuse to choose between them, because my voice does not count in the choice.

I'll keep posting thoughts about what I think the task is that we face, because the task does not change, regardless of who our leader is.

That task is hard stuff, and we'll all need to work together to make it happen.

The only important #teacupgate point

If we aren't careful, the next couple of days will be a distraction from the real choice facing the country.

The reason the Herald on Sunday should print a transcript between the two Johns is because the public needs to know whether any policy business was transacted.

ACT wants to sell all of New Zealand's SOEs.

With National dipping below elective dictatorship levels of support, they will need a support partner.

They didn't tell the truth about the GST rise which has always been part of the ACT agenda (to move tax off the wealthy and onto the poorest).

There is no reason to believe assurances to the contrary this time on state asset sales.

With National's panicked release of an empty list of 120 sound bites today, the absence of an economic plan by the incumbent government is now proved.

ACT would be ever so happy to fill the vacuum.

So — the issue is what was said. Let's focus on that.

National's obvious desire to pump bellows at the smoke in order to hide the fire shows there might be something embarrassing there.

I doubt it's more than that. I await being proved right or wrong.

In the meantime, let's stay focused on the defining issue of the campaign: whether National/ACT, Key/Brash sell out New Zealand's future, or whether with Labour and the Greens we all own it for ourselves.

First week and big picture

With a hiss and a roar the first week is done and here are some quick reflections from me:

1. Labour is setting the agenda. The talk is about the economy, taxes, fair wages and whether or not state assets should be sold. That's what we wanted to be talking about.

2. Phil Goff is performing very well. When someone has a long and strong track record as a minister, you wonder how they will go in the front of things. I could not be happier with how Phil has stepped up, and commentators have noticed it too.

3. The emerging choice is quite stark. On economic, environment and social policies, Labour is setting out a bold agenda for change. National is setting out a timid agenda to continue New Zealand's failing status quo.

I've been doing long days in Wellington on a range of campaign projects as well as talking with punters. The vibe is ok, but then it is Wellington which is a little bit lefter than the rest of the country. Labour's campaign is working well internally and fundraising is going ok too, despite the mountain we have to climb politically.

20 days more hard slog. Putting our case for how New Zealand needs to change to everyone we can.

Keep a sharp eye on the polls in the next two weeks.

I'll try and blog more too.

Favourite policies out so far for me — broadcasting, and EQC, and still the transformational capital gains tax we did in July.

Today's environment launch has gone well too.

And so we roll on... Continuing to set the agenda and see a curiously flat-footed set of opponents spend their time on our ground.

Work and Wages: more of both thanks, to #ownourfuture

Should we close the wage gap with Australia a bit?

Would organising the world of work a little bit more similarly to the way Australia does, to help with that task?

My answer to both questions is yes, which is why I was pleased with our release today of Labour's Work and Wages policy.

Ever since the 1980s, New Zealand workers have seen wages lower than they should have done.  The radical reforms of Rogernomics weren't the issue so much as the massive stripping away of labour market deregulation.

Instead of dealing with a sclerotic system of compulsory union membership by sorting things out, political parties of the right conspired with employers to remove almost every protection Kiwi workers have, other than the barest minima of procedural fairness.

The result, partly of this and partly of other anti-fairness policies, is a hollowed out labour market with poverty wages at the bottom, and stagnant incomes in the middle, with the rich running away with the loot, pardon the phrase.

Those people have had a dream run.  The basic attack on collective bargaining embodied in the ECA was not fully turned around by the Employment Relations Act.  The voices of the powerful made sure that Act could never be as effective as it should have been.

So today, aside from other important and welcome minimum code improvements like better minimum wages, we announced a new form of employment agreement that can join individual and collective agreements: Industry Standard Agreements.

These offer industries with some baseline collective bargaining going on, the chance to extend core norms for minimum conditions across the whole industry.  It's like customising the minimum code for a particular industry, depending on its ability to pay and other circumstances.

It's a great idea.  It avoids the pitfalls of compulsory membership of trade unions, but strengthens the impact of collective bargaining none the less.

Watch for the people who complain about it.  They will form into two camps.  They'll be motivated apologists for, or attack dogs of, the political Right.  Or, they will be representatives of employer and industry groups who have enjoyed a long period of free-loading on the shoulders of people who work hard and pay their taxes.

Neither should be given much attention on an objective basis, but the voices of the rich and the powerful are always amplified loudly - especially when someone challenges their assumed privileges (in this case, the privilege to under-pay people).

By moving towards the more regulated Australian labour market, we will see relatively higher wages in New Zealand than we otherwise would.

National is pledging further weakening of labour laws.  That would feed through into lower wages, greater inequality, and the top end pocketing the lot -- precisely what has happened every time it's been tried, no matter where.

Decent wages are a good thing for the people earning them, and for the companies who employ too.  They focus management minds on lifting productivity.  They honour the efforts people make in the work place.

There's only one hitch: it won't happen on its own. 

To make things better, you've got to vote for change, and that means a change to a Labour-led government.

The centre-right's policy is the opposite.  Lower wages and vulnerable work is their ambition. That is what National and ACT stand for.

The choice is up to you.

Labour's policy on Information and Comms Technology

Another policy release this morning from our ICT spokesperson Clare Curran.  You can find the details at http://www.ownourfuture.co.nz/communications-and-ict

Labour's big picture in ICT has always been a well-rounded one.  You saw in the 2000s that our Digital Strategies didn't just focus on connections, but on the ability of people to use them, and for there to be relevant Kiwi content for people to access through ICT.

This policy expands on that approach, and tackles digital divides in some useful ways. For instance, out of the scarce cash that Labour's tight fiscal framework will allow, there is some more money for Computers in Homes and for the Computer Clubhouse. 

There are some critically important but arguably quite wonky specifics too:  we'd finally converge New Zealand's telco and broadcasting regulation under one agency, bring all the government machinery on ICT into one Ministry, and work to make rural and provincial broadband better by expanding the remit of the ultra-fast broadband project so that, over time, more people get it.

I only have one regret really about the whole broadband sector. If National had carried on with Labour's Broadband Investment Fund approach to roll out fibre, there'd be quite a lot of it out there today. Instead we got a three-year delay, and now in November 2011 we are back to where we were in November 2008, except that New Zealand is spending a lot more cash to do only a little bit more rollout.

That said, most of the other things we suggest in our policy are about common sense, knitting ICT into the every day of communities, schools, businesses and people's homes -- as it is for many people today.

The theme of inclusion matters.  If we want to build a New Zealand where we own our own future, broadband and ICT use can't just be used by those who are most familiar with them, and can't only be accessible to those with cash.

Liberal foundations: equality is at the core of our politics

I joined the Labour Party when I was at university mainly because I wanted to see the main left party in New Zealand start to unpick the damage of the neo-liberal revolution (that it, unfortunately, had started).

I didn't really know the party's views on gay issues, but generally speaking as I worked my way into the organisation, I didn't have any problems being an out gay man. Like in any large organisation you meet the odd homophobe, which I've always found quite shocking, but they are few and far between.

When a political party is founded on equality between people, as Labour is, people expect certain things to flow.  They expect the policy of that party to give effect to that principle, and to advance it in office.  They expect the representatives of that party, inside and outside Parliament, to honour and uphold that principle in all that they say, and all that they do.

Throughout all I've done in politics, that's been at the foundation of my involvement. It's why I bother to do anything political: the principle of equality.

Being gay gives that principle a special resonance, becaues it is in the area of sexuality that some of the most needless and painful inequalities remain.

A gay couple, joined together in love for their lives, cannot get married.

If they are in a civil union, that couple can't adopt kids.

These and all remaining areas of law need to be changed, based on a simple fundamental premise: we are all equal. We are all human beings who are deserving of the same rights and privileges as every other citizen. 

Gay people are not separate-but-equal. We won't put up with that and neither should anyone else who proclaims inequality to be something they fight against.

Law is only one part of it, but it's an important part, because the law is the established consensus and code of our society and its values.  Just as racism in law would be abhorrent to me, just as sexism would be, so discrimination based on sexual orientation is.

The signals sent by any discrimination are that those who are on the receiving end of it are less than fully human -- less than deserving of an equal measure of dignity and respect in their inherent humanity than other people of a different race, or gender, or sexuality.

Such attitudes belong with the dinosaurs. They are an offensive part of the past, and they have no place in New Zealand's politics.

But it isn't just about the law.  There are a whole host of other signals sent and institutions in which values are embedded which need to change. 

Schools are not safe enough for young people -- particularly young queer people.

Vicious attacks still see young people -- and not so young people -- injured and killed.

Homophobia in sport and in public culture still make too-common appearances.

These things create a climate that is reinforced by the discrimination codified in our law: a climate where some of us are less equal than others.  Where it's OK to pick on us or belittle us or insult us, because we just aren't as good as the rest.

Where it's OK to wish we would just keep quiet about these issues, and where "making a fuss" is sometimes seen as more of a problem than the hate it is designed to call out, expose and diminish.

A very brave set of men and women have stood up to and challenged such thinking over the past decades, and from their work a great deal of progress has come.  The Labour Party is a part of that tradition, but it is not all of it.  Many of our current and past MPs though have been at the forefront of helping things change, and that is something that will continue.

I wish that Labour was perfect on these issues, but of course it isn't. Not all of the Labour Party has comprehensively come to grips with what equality means.

Sometimes that shows through in Parliamentary debate, though that place is so odd and strange and stuck in the past that this surprises me less than it should. Labour MPs in Parliament are there to uphold equality.  Sexist, racist or homophobic remarks are never ok, and never excusable.

Sometimes it shows through in a desire to keep civil rights issues in the background, because doing so is politically simpler. That doesn't help change attitudes.  It might let you get some legal changes through but it doesn't confront and end the hate and fear that motivate the attitudes that liberalism seeks to change.

My point of view is pretty simple and, I suppose, unsophisticated.

Human rights are not negotiable, and their equal and universal application is a principle of which the Labour party and the labour movement are and ought to be proud.

Labour's 2011 Rainbow policy embodies these things, but because it is the product of a collective process, it doesn't express them as I do.  It touches the right areas: legal equality, the respect agenda, and so on.  For that I am very pleased.

What I want next is to see a Labour-led government implementing those things: driving respect, implementing equality.  I am 100% confident our partners to the left won't have any concerns with us so doing.  I do not fundamentally believe our opponents on the right do either, though I have no confidence they would restrain themselves from politically convenient attacks on Labour in office driving this agenda.

Human rights are about human lives.  Every day we remain a country with inequality in the law and with discrimination on the street, people suffer from it. 

Whether it's the stress of living in the closet; or the constant need to "come out" because of the default assumption of straightness (and the associated wondering how people will react); or the fear induced by intolerant and unsafe environments in schools or workplaces; or the physical fear and injury caused by assaults and worse; or the tragic cases of suicide where people could not handle the lack of acceptance they found in their lives; or whether it is the cold blooded ending of people's lives due to homophobic murder.

All of these things in various ways are the consequence of inequality.

Inequality that it is time to end.

And so alongside the urgent need to set New Zealand on the path to a sustainable and people-friendly economic approach to the world, I am proud to be a liberal in the Labour Party, and to support policies that will help to make life better for people like me, and for everyone who believes that we are, actually, all equal.

Policy galore rolling out for #ownourfuture

I'm pleased with how the policies that Labour has released so far have been received.

We had the earlier releases of our tax package allowing us to avoid state asset sales, our Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Plan, and our plans on Youth Skills and Employment.

More recently has seen the release of parts of how we'll progress the Equality agenda, with our Women's Policy, our Interfaith policy, and our Rainbow policy all in circulation.

In other areas we've put out our ideas on Tertiary Education, dealing to "National's Standards" in schooling, and even some ideas on sports and recreation.

We also released our policy on Police and Corrections, which I like because its focused on two things that are important: quick response to so-called petty crime (how anyone thinks a burglary is petty is beyond me, having suffered a few as a child, but anyhow), and making sure prisons are about rehab not academies for crime.  The devotion of some precious money to making sure all one-person police stations become two-person ones is good too.

Aged care policy was released at the end of September, following the select committee inquiry into how to improve the situation for older New Zealanders.

And a final one that I went to the launch of was our policy on overseas development, which you can find here.

All our policy is available at www.ownourfuture.co.nz.  There'll be new policy out on a very frequent basis between now and election day.  Some very interesting ones coming out next week...

 

I wonder...

We have had a double downgrade of our credit rating, because there's no plan for growing our investments & our savings for the future.

We have oceans of red ink in the public accounts, because of unaffordable tax cuts to the people who need it the least.

We see ongoing attacks on the capacity of the core public sector to do it's job.

Will people choose more of this approach?

Labour's Rainbow policy: a clarification for some liars out there

I've always been proud that the Labour Party has been in the vanguard of pushing an equality agenda in New Zealand.  Our record in government during the 2000s was good, with most Labour MPs voting in favour of civil unions (compared with 3/27 Nats), and a range of improvements in other areas under way. Our role in bringing about the decriminalisation of homosexuality in the 1980s is a matter of record.

This progress comes from our commitment to equality, and our belief that everyone has the same rights, no matter what their sexual orientation is.  This is a view that is nowadays widely shared in New Zealand society, and that is good.

Labour has released the policy document which you can read here: http://www.ownourfuture.co.nz/rainbow

It tackles what might be summarised as the rights agenda, the respect agenda, and an international agenda to help make the world a safer place for people of different sexual orientations.  We will move on equal relationship law and tackle the vexed issue of adoption, which goes far beyond the question of whether gay couples can adopt and needs a thorough look.

Of course, with any issue like this there are some tricky politics.  I was at a Rainbow Wellington public forum last night where the ACT Candidate in Wellington Central, Stephen Whittington, referenced some dumb comments Trevor Mallard made in Parliament a while ago, calling the (openly gay) Attorney General Chris Finlayson "Tinkerbell".

This has been amplified today by that well known defender of the rights of queer people, David Farrar, on his blog KiwiBlog, and by Whittington himself in a media release.  The result is this Stuff story "Labour accused of homophobia cover-up" by Andrea Vance.

Farrar's allegations are nonsense.  He (and Whittington) are lying when they say that Grant and Charles denied Trevor's 'tinkerbell' stuff.  They did no such thing.

They would have been stupid to. The remarks were well covered at the time.  We told Trevor what we thought. Making slurs like that in Parliament is totally unacceptable.

What they denied is that Mallard is homophobic. They are right.  Trevor has been a staunch defender of social liberal causes and was a key player in the fight to decriminalise homosexuality in the 1980s. His voting record on queer rights issues is perfect. 

So my message to Whittington and to David Farrar is: stop lying on this point.

Farrar's other comments are much more low key.

• The quote from Ashraf was a jumble of nonsense which he was horrified by and which he apologised for at the time, and in any case he is leaving Parliament at this election.
• The reason our policy talks about the care of children issue is that adoption is complex and problematic from a whole set of different directions. It isn't just about gay adoption and I don't think it would be right to try and make it so.

For someone who is a social liberal, David sure does spend a lot of time stirring up nasty stuff.  Today's post is not the first example.

As for Stephen Whittington:  Steve, I don't know if you're gay or not, and I don't care either way, but next time you make a fuss about what happens at a public meeting, you might want to make sure you have your facts right.

And to both - this is a pretty sad attempt to cover up and distract from the question at the Rainbow Wellington forum that kicked this all off, which is about the views that a certain Mr John Banks holds on issues of homosexuality, and the things he did and said about it in the 1980s.  Or perhaps the distraction is from Tau Henare's homophobic remarks to Charles Chauvel the other week in Parliament?  Either way, sad.

Update - Fri 14 Oct, 4.40pm:

Trevor in Stuff this morning acknowledged that he should never have made the "Tinkerbell" remarks, which is true and good.

Out of the Rainbow Wellington meeting, Tony Reed (who is RW Secretary and isn't a candidate for any political party!) has the view that Grant and Charles did deny that Trevor had made homophobic remarks. Their argument is that they denied he was homophobic.

This begins to sound very much like dancing on the head of a pin, and I can't judget it as I wasn't there.

I stand by the key points I made above in the body of the post:

• Trevor should never have said what he said in Parliament, and it is indefensible that he did it.
• Grant and Charles wouldn't have defended it
• Trevor isn't a homophobe, and Grant and/or Charles were right to say so

If anyone else who was at the meeting and isn't affiliated to a political party has a view of what happened, I'd be interested to hear it.

I've never defended homophobia anywhere and I'm not defending it now.  I don't like seeing my friends dragged in the mud for things that they haven't done or haven't said.  There is more than enough in what people have said and done to keep political debate going.

Downgrades #gfc etc

New Zealand owes the world too much.  It's not a government problem, but government can help the privatae sector fix it. That stock of debt was the main driver for the downgrades we faced on Friday.  It's the main thing politicians have wanted to avoid, but now it has happened.

Our fiscal situation is broadly OK.  Government paid off a lot of debt in the 1990s and 2000s, and the level is quite low.  We need investments to drive growth that will help close the debt gap, and we need a tax system that drives productive investment and closes the fiscal gap in the future, but Labour's already set those things out.

Private sector savings is the next big frontier.  KiwiSaver was really starting to turn things around, building a culture of savings where people could see the cash adding up and plan what to do with it when they retired.

It was a good scheme that's been cut at, but it needs to be rebuilt and extended.  We need to tackle with even greater urgency the need for Kiwis to save more. It's the only way we can #ownourfuture.

By itself though it won't be enough, and Labour's acknowledged already that in the 2000s we didn't move in the right direction or fast enough on some things. I think savings is one. Regulation of the finance sector, and doing something about the property bubble are two others.

The election is now going to focus more sharply on these things than it was going to before the downgrades.  The country needs a credible plan to lift growth, reduce the government deficit without cutting needed investments, and get people saving again.