Post election fallout contaminates TOP, the Maori Party and National

File this under “what were they thinking!?”

The last few weeks has seen a number of activities which could be accurately described as “post-election fallout” as the particular “coalition oriented reality” that the 2017 September general election has imposed on the denizens of New Zealand’s political ecosystem (that of Labour, NZ First and the Greens as government) makes itself felt.

And in this case the fallout is coming from what could be politely termed as the three “losers” of the election, that being TOP, The Maori Party and National*. Further two of these cases can be seen as the direct result of bad decision making regarding a parties particular electoral strategy prior to the election while the third (in this case National) can be seen as laying the foundation for a similar type of catastrophe if ever implemented.

And as I am back from my blogging sabbatical lets indulge in a jolly game of seeing which of these three dumpster fire, train wrecks stacks up as the worse and how it came about.

TOP tops itself

First up is the Gareth Morgan vanity project more commonly known as The Opportunity Party (TOP).

 In the two months prior to the election I researched and wrote a whole 2000 word post on TOP which went in the dead end file because no matter how I spun it, the phrase “rich man playing at politics” kept repeating itself and there was really little else to say about Morgan treading down the same path as Kim Dotcom and “Creepy” Colin Craig, all of who did little more than spray round blobs of their wealth to purchase political media which had little more content on it than their respectively gormless faces.

Therefore it was not surprising to read last week that Morgan pulled the plug on TOP by resigning from the party, along with other senior members, as the odds of Morgan hauling his political carcass over the 5% threshold became starkly clear round about June when TOP had been in operation for six months and had little to show for it except Morgan looking down on people from billboards (and that metaphor can’t be labored enough) like a baby-boomer version of Big Brother from 1984.

And I will happily go on record in saying that my prediction that TOP would bring some “excitement” to the election campaign was way off the mark as in making said prediction I had anticipated that Morgan would not fall into the same trap as Craig and Dotcom had and actually run a political campaign seeking to worm his way into the voters’ minds with some clever and relevant means to tap into the fumes of discord that were rising from the political morass that FukYoo politics had created in NZ.

But I was wrong and to save space in this post I will sum up Moragn, and the approximately two million dollars he spent on the party and campaigning, as coming up with little more than his face on billboards, one failed legal challenge and the lingering stench in the publics mind that if elected his first act in parliament would be to enact some sort of rabid PC jihad on all felines in Aotearoa**.

Morgan talked big when he launched TOP in November 2016 and had some nice policy ideas buried away in the background but for all his comparison to Donald Trump, Morgan failed to live up to his hype, as at least Trump got elected, and all Morgan could do was flail around and squabble with party members, politicians and the public via twitter.

The key failing of this absurdly quixotic*** quest were simply Morgan deciding that he was to be the face of the party (which was the most obvious flag that this was little more than a vanity project for Morgan’s brittle ego) and not spending enough money to get ones political brand out in an already saturated marketplace (because two million dollars does not buy as much brand awareness as one might expect when you’re spending it all on creepy billboards and torpedoing your own polling by acting like a douche).

If I had the money to enter politics I might consider a run at parliament but the simple fact is I do not have the doubloons to buy myself a political party or indulge in the clearly obvious fantasy that Morgan was labouring under; that he was some sort of kiwi philosopher king writ large and come to save NZ with his unique brand of straight talking, common sense that only he could dispense.

The 2.4% TOP got in the polls is impressive per se for a first time out political party but when compared to what the Internet and Conservative parties polled in previous elections*4 it’s no big deal and clearly not any more resonant with the average voter than what Kim Dotcom or Colin Craig was peddling.

Going down with the waka

And from one wally called Morgan and a failed political party to another (albeit one that previously made it into parliament); this time Tuku Morgan, who recently quit his role as president of the Maori Party and was the architect of the parties disastrous campaign strategy in the recent election.

What was so disastrous about this strategy you ask?

Well for starters, it appeared to be completely divorced from the political reality of the Maori Party in 2017, polling well below the 5% threshold (often so close to zero as to be irrelevant) and being totally reliant on a single seat (all the others being won back by Labour in previous elections since 2005 when the party held all seven).

The kernel of Tuku's strategy was simple: get the Maori King (of who Morgan was an advisor to) to bad mouth the Labour Party in the run up to the election as a means to drum up support and arrest the hideous fall in seats and vote share*5 from their peak in 2005 when they swept all Maori seats in the wake of the foreshore & seabed issue.

So the Kings message was “screw Labour…” and nothing more which really was not the best way to endorse your own party and certainly not from an individual who, while royalty, seemed to have no real relevance to Maori in general and at best seemed to be an easily manipulated figurehead. And as I noted at the time royalty taking sides in politics is a dicey issue because if your side does not get in your out in the cold and that’s exactly what happened.

Labour now has all the Maori seats, Maori candidates and MPs and in the simple move of raising the minimum wage shortly after taking power did more for Maori, who are more affected by having to work in low paid occupations than others, in that single act than anything the Maori Party did in its nine years in the government.

Tuku Morgan should have known that the key to success in Maori politics was getting and retaining those seven Maori seats, as they conferred the political weight in parliament to make them an attractive coalition partner, and that what gave the party those seats in the first place was the wellspring of discontent that the foreshore & seabed issue had tapped into in 2005 and not the petty backbiting of a mostly irrelevant individual towards the one party which was the traditional resting place of the Maori voter.

And he should have known that if the party was to retain those seats it had to deliver meaningful change to Maori and not just political spin and empty promises which is why by the time 2017 rolled around the party had lost all but one seat and polled so low as to not count at all.

To be fair to Morgan though, by the time he came up with this bat-brained idea the party was already in dire straits under the leadership of Te Ururoa Flavell and Marama Fox and was fatally weakened from the get go when Pita Sharples and Tariana Turia made the fateful choice to go with National in 2008.

But the party could have gone out in a better fashion than it did or even made a fighting stand if there had been an idea better suited than the extremely low budget wrestling smack talk employed by Morgan, via the Maori King, to try and make Maori care about the Maori party.

And if vanity was the downfall of Gareth Morgan and TOP it’s not too difficult to see that Tuku Morgan may not have been the best choice for the role of party president or campaign strategist as Morgan political credentials remain solely an $89 pair of boxer shorts and rhorting the public weal so it’s hard to imagine what else other than his own vanity was prompting him to think that his plan was going to work when every shred of reality would have been saying “Kahore, kahore, kahore!”

National’s imaginary friend

And last but not least in this caravan of, what my staff-sergeant would have politely referred to as, “s**t rushing to the brain” ideas, is the recent news that the National Party is looking to form a new conservative party.

Of course they denied it but after I ran this past my well placed National party contact, T, the response I got was more than enough for me to believe this rumour has some truth to it.

I do acknowledge the sheer science fiction scale to the idea that National clone itself as a means to pad out the illusion that it’s the only party of any substance on the right side of the political line after the coalition of NZ First, Labour and the Greens has made living under a coalition seem like a harmonious possibility and thereby politically and ideologically isolating National.

However what I did get from T was more than enough to indicate that while saner minds might have prevailed at obvious lunacy of the mainline suggestion, one particular comment from him (which I shan’t repeat here) was more than enough to make me think that National is no longer keen on supporting political misanthrope ACT and, with its previous “coalition partners” (Peter Dunne and the Maori Party) out of parliament, it may be feeling a bit lonesome out there in right (wing) field.

And while ACT is nothing more than a political welfare scheme for Seymour, National has to take the blame for creating the god-forsaken, Ann-Randian, one man sewer that ACT has become by their continual gifting of Epsom to ACT as the means to foster the illusion that there is something more right-wing (and all that such a term entails) than National out there in New Zealand.

So while national cloning itself is off the cards I would not be surprised if national sought to clone ACT, which could then be gifted Epsom and thus maintain the illusion that there is something further right of National in NZ politics while simultaneously getting risk of pesky (and uncontrollable) ACT.

However given the obvious rifts that do exists within the party (think: whoever keeps leaking documents and information to Nicky Hagar or to the media (ie the Todd Barclay scandal) and the fact that there is nothing inherently monolithic about right wing politics and it would be prudent for the party to figure out how to keep those issues contained rather than have them spill out in public.

The problem is that splitting the vote base is not the way to do this as creating a satellite party has all sorts of risks. The first (as noted in the media) is that the public may see it as nothing more than a front for National and as such have no faith in its independence while the second is that there is no guarantee that once you spilt the vote base that the other party will remain controllable (think how the Tea-Party antics in the US have hurt the Republicans).

So what to do?

My guess is this issue will simmer away in National until someone feels strong enough to challenge Bill English for the leadership and what will predicate that will be any significant drop in Nationals polling, which at this time, is not an issue but those numbers can’t hold forever given the fickle nature of the average NZ voter and with national in opposition it is only a matter of time before something gives.

So until that time I give Bill & the B Team a pass on this one but the fact that somewhere in National this idea got floated is enough to put them in the same category as TOP and the Maori party in this post under the “what were they thinking!?” moniker.

So who is the most contaminated?

The easy answer to that question is the Maori party, who pissed away the opportunity given to them by the seven seats they once had in parliament and who as per my old KP post Many waka, one star to guide them shows that the biggest problem in Maori politics is the Maori politicians themselves.

TOPs abysmal outcome in the election really only hurt Gareth Morgan and with the party now all but dead expect the 2.4% that voted for TOP to head back to Labour (based on all TOP voters I have met, all seem to be disgruntled Labour) while National can be forgiven for indulging in some off-the-wall thinking, post-election, but the real test for them is that they still need a solution to their obvious problems, that of needing to rejuvenate the party (but more on that in another post soon).

For all three parties, the brave, post election face they had been putting on has finally melted away in the extreme left/center radiation being given off by the coalition government and exposed what lies beneath.

*-No, ACT does not count in this sense as; a) they held onto their seat but more importantly b) they were losers to begin with in the more realistic sense of being purely in parliament at the behest of National.

**-something he doubled down on post-election when the PMs cat died and he decided that it would be the right time to make further comment on it.

***-yes I know it’s probably redundant using absurd as an adjective to quixotic but if the shoes fits…

*4-The Internet Party polled 1.42% in the 2014 election while the Conservatives polled 2.65% and 3.97% in 2011 and 2014 respectively

*5-In 2005 2.12% and 7 seats; 2008 2.39 and 4 seats; 2011 1.43% and 3 seats; 2014 1.32% and 1 seat and 2017 1.2% and zero seats!

Elections 2017: The temptation of James Shaw

When the Devil had finished all his tempting, he left him until an opportune time – Luke 4:13

It’s been interesting over the last week to watch the mainstream political media in NZ twist desperately as they try and fill their daily news quota because Winston is simply stalling for time and there is almost nothing else to discuss in politics until parliament starts up.

Thus it’s been right royally entertaining and somewhat depressing to see the slew of articles coming out discussing James Shaw taking the Greens over to National.

Now to be fair it’s a prospect I have also raised in the past but the difference is my portrayal of the situation (which I shall elaborate on a bit below) was always based on the impulse of Shaw himself and not via any conscious decision by the party, its vote base or some sort of policy pragmatism.

No, what’s being hailed here is something very very different. What is being set up here is the pre-greasing of the public to accept a Green/National government, via a strangely compliant media, based on the rational (and dare I say public choice) idea that who cares about principles or where you are on the political spectrum just think about the what you will get if you do!

Normally dependable reporters like Stacey Kirk and Tracy Watkins on Stuff have been busy shoveling the kind of half-baked analysis that is more at the level of my standard stream of consciousness rot than their usual astute analysis and reportage.

Elsewhere Isaac Davidson over at the NZ Herald has not been immune to “going with the flow” and turning out something that is similar to his counterparts over at Stuff.

Meanwhile leave it to Martyn Bradbury over at the DailyBlog to get to the point (also here) and explain why a Green/National coalition would be a toxic result for Greens.

Because what would happen if James Shaw, and I mean James Shaw, not the party, took the Greens over to the other side would be for all intents and purposes and the end of the Greens.

It would be the birth of the very short lived James Shaw party which would live and die in exactly the same fashion as the Maori Party did when it cozied up to National and then got obliterated at the polls for essentially betraying its core vote base.

Because what Shaw would be attempting to do is pole vault the Greens over two other parties on the political spectrum (Labour and NZ First) to place it next to National, as long term coalition partner or just for some casual confidence and supply (the political equivalent of friends with benefits (or should that be benefits?), at the expense of any solid understanding of how democracy works.

Shaw, like Winston in my last post, is not free to buy and sell, horse trade or even prostitute his vote share to any and all parties that come a courting, despite what the media is trying to say. It not only betrays the democratic mechanic and spirit, its also just plain stupid.

And the alarm bells that should be ringing in Shaws brain right now do not stop there as the only actor in recent NZ political history I can think off of that managed to pull off that trick is Richard Prebble when he went from Labour to ACT, and we all know how that turned out.

Prebble, the golem of the Treasury Trokia from the mid-1980s, who, along with Roger Douglas and David Caygill* had their names etched forever in infamy as men who poisoned the well in NZ left-wing politics and set NZ on the unwholesome path it is treading today is not a good example of how to manage your party, its brand or its future.

What Prebble is a good example of, is one individual selling out his constituents and party (Labour Leaning Auckland Central in the 70s and 80s) for his own personal gain and in doing so being remembered only as scumbag political hack who once lead ACT.

And Shaw could have all of that if he takes the bait and goes to National.

Sure it makes all the policy sense in the world, when Stacey Kirk phrases it along pure policy lines, but it would be a very personal and very short term gain for James Shaw; and those lucky few high enough on the party list to get into parliament, who get a few years to play in politics while the Green brand goes from skating just above the 5% threshold to the same level as the Maori Party today (essentially 0%).

But given how bastardized the Green party is at this time, with its skew towards social justice more than the environment and their feet suddenly feeling the chill after having come down from the lofty heights of Mt Morality it is a possibility that could happen but what the media is not making clear is what happens to little green fish that swim with the big Blue Shark.

Sure the Greens were kept in a rather limited bowl by Labour but they were never threatened with annihilation (just subservience), as they would be for sucking on the teats of National.

So while we can blame the dictates of Winston Peters (and his refusal to ever work with the Greens) for being the primer for nudging Shaw along this path, that is the only rationality which would justify such a move and, as noted above, it would be purely short term and purely personal gain.

If Shaw needs any evidence of what decrepit fate awaits him its right there in the now vacant offices and work spaces of the Maori Party in Bowen House and Parliament.

Of course if Shaw is a corporate Trojan horse or Security Service mole, like has been speculated for some time in Wellington, then his going with National would lock those theories into pole position on the grid as Shaw is not stupid enough to think he could salvage the party from such a fate that has befallen so many in NZ politics and around the world but he might be willing (and stupid) enough to sell the party down the river for his own gain (or that of his masters).

The track record for voter betraying minor political parties is not good and if Shaw was a deep cover operative then this would be the perfect time to follow his MK Ultra programming and take the party over to the dark side.

However what sits in my mind now is not some political parable but the story of St Paul who started out his career as hunter of Christians but was struck down and blinded, on the road to Damascus, by the glory of Christ, and spent three days blind and suffering before a Christian healer made the scales fall from his eyes (hence where the saying comes from), he “saw the light” and converted to Christianity.

If the story stopped there is would be warm fuzzies all around but it doesn’t, what happened after is that St Paul went on to become one of the most prominent of the Apostles and his works and thought dominates early Christianity and the New Testament as one of the most rabid evangelists for Jesus Christ.

In short Saul became a “prisoner of Christ”, suffered Stockholm syndrome, changed his name to Paul and then became a Jihadi proselytizer for the JC Franchise.

And if that is not making it clear enough then I will spell it out. If Shaw goes to National then he will spend the rest of his days as a raving believer for the rightness (pun intended) of his dark deed, religiously defending his actions because his total reversal for all that the Greens stand for will require a stupendous level of missionary zeal to convince, even himself, that his deal with the devil was worth it.

This is the temptation that James Shaw is facing because just as the Maori Party constantly kept referring to how they were doing it "for Maori" the end result was they really were doing it for themselves only and Maori in general got little to nothing from the bargain that Maori struck with National; and Shaw & Co will have to utter the exact same lines and platitudes as the Maori Party did while National gets a free pass for another three years***.

For the Aro Valley** champagne environmentalists, which now make up the limited core of the party, they might feel good for the initial moment when the Greens get to lick the lever of power in ritual subservience the the Great Wyrm but as they say, revenge is sweet but not fattening, and election 2020 will probably be time enough for Shaw to become as toxic as dairy stream in voters minds and as popular as Clitter.

So if Shaw wants to kiss the devils buttocks so be it but the media should not be trying to fool people to which way he is really going.

*-(Douglas as Hitler, Caygill as Gobbles and Prebble as Himmler)

**-And I should know because I lived just up the hill from Shaw for five years
***-To be fair a NZ First/Labour/Greens govt has all sorts of potential issues lurking just below the surface but its still better than another three years of National at this point

Elections 2017: The daffodils of change

If this election has been my medicine then I am now off my meds.

There are three weeks still to go before this election is “officially” over but for me it ended this morning when I saw daffodils in Hagley Park.

“Daffodils?” You ask (somewhat puzzled). “Yes, daffodils” I reply.

Daffodils: a quintessential symbol of spring, a whole gaggle of daffodils shooting forth from the grass along the river bank and under the trees. Daffodils: signalling the end of the cold damp winter and heralding the eventual return of warmer, balmy summer days.

See where this metaphor is going?

Spring is in the air, yes we have had a few showers now and then but there is a definite warming and I no longer find my cat hidden under my duvet, looking at me with indignant eyes that say “do you mind, your letting the heat out”*.

Of course spring does not mean summer just yet but it’s those little barometers of nature which know better than the weatherman which way things are going.

And it was in that unguarded moment when I saw those daffodils that its image struck straight through the crust of the conscious mind in into the deep depths of my subconscious, when I realised that even with three weeks to go this election was over.

It’s over, dear reader, not because the calendar says it’s so, not because the polls say it’s so (although they are looking rather daffodil-like at this time) and not because the politicians say it’s so but because the daffodils say it is so.

But before I announce the winner let us consider the losers first.

ACT

To say that David Seymour and ACT have been irrelevant this election is completely incorrect as David has been politically irrelevant since the day he got gifted his seat in the house and the party has been irrelevant since the mid-2000s.

Nothing he or the party does has any meaning or bearing on the political landscape of NZ and they know it.

I don’t even consider them when I look at poll results and apart from a few obligatory pieces I see in the media, written to give the illusion of “equal coverage”, there is nothing he can say or do that will prevent him and the party from being identified as a bunch of misguided zealots with the same dangerous and outdated ideas that got NZ into this mess in the first place.

Also with the numbers looking close there might not even be the safety of National standing aside in Epsom to get him back into parliament as ACT poll so far below the margin of error that its clear they exists only by the grace of National.

So ACT gets a giant L for “looser” stamped on its hand and we can consign them to the dustbin of history.

MAORI/MANA

For a while the alliance of the Maori Party and Mana seemed like a good idea as its avoided splitting any potential votes and pooled resources for the coming campaign.

However Tuku Morgan’s plan to use Labour as whipping boy for all of the their ill fortune only worked somewhat even when Andrew Little was still leading Labour, as even then their polling still never climbed above 2%, but took a complete nose dive when Jacinda Ardern took over.

The Maori Party irrepably soiled its name when it hitched its waka to National for one season too many and even the recent comments by Marama Fox that they would be willing to work Labour are not going to help it get back all those Maori seats Labour holds.

If National is gone in government then so too will the Maori party be gone. They might retain their current seat or even pull back a seat or two from Labour (although I have yet to see anything which indicates that) but there will be no seat at the cabinet table for them in a Labour government after both the Party and the Maori King (at the urging of Tuku) decided to denounce Labour in no uncertain terms.

Gone by Monday the 25^th of September.

GREENS

There is not much left to say about the sad and sorry saga that has been the Green party in the last 12 months so I will simply summarize here by saying that James Shaw ran an unsuccessful internal coup on the party to seize control which tore the party apart and destroyed the Green brand as the only principled party in NZ politics.

Shaw now gets to be leader in all but name (as he is still calling himself “co-leader” but he is fooling nobody) but he is the leader of a party that had a 15% poll rating only two months ago and is now hovering around the 5% threshold like a soap bubble circling the drain.

Probably worst of all is that Shaw might survive this election but under his leadership the party is doomed to be seen as nothing more than a bunch of Champagne environmentalists playing at politics rather than a genuine political party.

Back to the compost heap.

NZ FIRST

Wait, what?

Oh yes, NZ First faithful, even Winston is going to lose this election because despite being the potential “kingmaker” again this election it’s clear that his mojo aint what it used to be and the recent slip in the polls show the party also hovering only slightly higher than the Greens at the 5% threshold.

But what about Winston power to anoint the new PM I hear you cry?

So what? Winston gets to choose the king but he will never get to be the king and that’s what he wants. Also this election will be Winston’s last tilt at the windmill and in order to secure his legacy in NZ politics he has to avoid making the ruinous choices he made in 1996 and 2005 when he backed the wrong horse and saw him being cursed rather than heaped in hosannas.

This election Winston has to make the right choice and while he is not in the looser category like ACT, the GREENS or MAORI/MANA at best he gets to redeem himself rather than reap the rewards that this election could have brought.

It’s not his polling or his cruddy party members that put him in this bracket but the simple fact that when he goes NZ First goes also and that for a man on whose shoulders so much has rested he has twice made the wrong choice for New Zealand (ie the job of a MP) in order to benefit himself in the short term.

So this September, when Labour and National come calling, Winnie has only one choice but to support the winner (see who that is below) or be consigned to the same dustbin that Peter Dunne and United Future went into (slightly different to the dustbin that ACT is going into) as a malingering political mercenary who never lived up to the promise he had.

If he does not his legacy will be similar to many of his fellow MPs (think how people like John Banks and Gerry Brownlee are viewed) and that is not what he wants, deep down Winston wants to be loved.

And now we come to our runner up, drum roll please…

NATIONAL

Sorry readers from Kiwiblog, I know a few of you over there really dig Bill & Co but it’s time to accept that has not been a good year for National or their political fortunes.

Ever since John Key left, National has been forced to get by on its own means without the gigantic crutch that Key’s popularity was for them and its shown.

Little that Bill and the B Team have done in the last 10 months has resonated with the electorate or helped stave off the ravenous monster that Jacindamania has been.

What’s worse is that had Andrew Little stayed leader of Labour it was almost a given that Bill would get to be PM and see National into a fourth term. What stings even more is that they (and Key) knew this and they did everything they could to keep Little in play rather than let Jacinda get to be leader in what I can only call “the Jacinda Ardern anti-coup plan”.

To give them their due they nearly pulled it off and possibly would have if for a few small “details” that they forgot to consider.

The first is that by being the current government in power they don’t get to harness any of the populist energy that is going around at this time (they lost that when Key jumped ship).

The second is despite Labour being the party that let the free-market beast that is neo-liberalism into NZ, National has been forever identified as the party that still supports its cruel tenants even while the its noxious after effects such as the housing hernia, failing education and health systems and dirty water sicken the nation further.

The third is that National is a third term government which has long since spent the mandate given to it in 2008 and was previously holding on only due to its claim to be a “steady pair of hands” when the opposition seemed about as capable of running the nation as the pissed inebriants of a hens night or stag party. With Jacinda and Labour on the rise that argument is swept away in the effervescing fervour that they are riding.

Even the usual election lolly scramble promises of money for this or money for that have only managed to slow the tide and for most people it’s either too little too late or an obvious election bribe with no reality behind it were National to get back into power.

Thus for Bill English he gets to be the man who led the party to electoral defeat twice and if this does not end his political career I don’t know what will.

If there is a saving grace for National it is that hopefully being out of government will allow many of the deadwood MPs that currently infect the party (such as Collins, Brownlee, Smith, Tolley, Bennet et al) to slither gracefully into the night and allow a new generation of younger, and less corrupted, MPs to take over and revitalise the party.

The origins of National come from 1935 and the failure of the Liberal and Reform parties (the forerunners of National), as the then government to manage the great depression and the nation (which also saw the election of the first Labour Government under Michael Joseph Savage) and it’s this fate which National either has to embrace, by reforming itself or face the same fate as those parties (National did not return to government until 1949).

The lesson here is obvious. National in opposition can take the time to tap into the mood of the nation, figure out a less toxic set of principles to guide their policy and rebuild the party brand after it was hollowed out by the skeezy antics of John Key and debased by the rest of its MPs in their never ending quest to hold power for its own sake rather than to serve the national interest.

I have never born any ill will towards the National party itself, only its MPs and brain trust and I remain a political pragmatist (rather than a tribalist) who votes where the best outcome for NZ (not myself) lies and who knows, if National can get rid of that lice ridden free-market security blanket that its forever clutching (while its sucks its political thumb) I might someday consider voting for it.

WINNER - LABOUR

So yes, Labour for the win, and I am not even a Labour supporter nor will I be voting for them this year BUT it’s impossible to deny the energy that Jacinda Ardern has generated as party leader and the effect that has had on party fortunes.

Fact: Labour still does not have a policy pot to piss in BUT Jacinda.

Fact: there are still deadwood MPs in the party which need to be ruthlessly pruned before the party can grow again BUT Jacinda!

Fact: Labour needs to live up the promise of change (ala the spirit of Norman Kirk and 1972) that is currently driving the mood of the electorate BUT Jacinda!!

Jacindamania might not be affecting everyone (as I write this a Nicky Wagner party van drives past my window) but after nine years of National the mood of the natives of NZ (ie that’s all Kiwis) is restive and you only have to look at the polling to see what’s coming.

Labour is not “trending up” when you look at the poll charts but shooting up like a bottle rocket. Sure there is a ceiling to that rapid climb but Labour is no longer cannibalizing vote share from the Greens but now it’s capturing it from NZ First and National (as per the latest polling numbers) which means that Labour has rebuilt its voter base and is now looking over the fence at Nationals (and NZ First’s) verdant pastures.

To be sure the insane popularity of Ardern and the party is being driven by the appetite for change that populism (and nine years of National) has created and thereby turned Labour from moribund political entity to dynamic avatar for political change and that if not willing (or able) to effect that change they will hit the post-election slump like all those other avatars which thought getting elected was all they had to do (Trump, Macron, Trudeau, May ect).

Even if the nightmare scenario occurs and National gets back in (either by itself or supported by Winston or the Greens) then it still wins in the same manner as Jeremy Corbyn did in the UK by retaining its avatar status while the Tory party (both UK and NZ) dissolves into a steaming miasma of low poll results, infighting and crisis mismanagement.

Then come the next election labour can swoop in and pick over the carcass of National (and sadly the nation) any time it wants because the mood in NZ after three more years of the Bill and Bennet show (reduced human right anyone?) will be just this side to the left of Smiths Dream.

Even if Labour 2017 only serves one term like Labour in 1972 (due to the death of Norman Kirk) there is still a lot of good things Labour can do in those three years (like Labour did between 1972 and 1975 to re-orientate NZ with the world, strengthen state housing and ACC).

And for a moment let’s just address the elephant in the room which is the popularity of Jacinda Ardern.

It’s not, as some have so bitterly described it, as “lipstick on a pig” or a temporary thing but like John Key (who acknowledged recently how popular she is) something which, in itself, might not supplement for bad policy (as Key’s did not for National) but it could carry the party through three terms as government which might be as far as the party is looking at this time.

Also Ardern’s popularity will not save her should Labour fail to follow through on what’s needed for NZ but that’s not on voters’ minds at this time.

Whats on their minds at this time is CHANGE, some change, any change. Something has to give and for that to happen all those hopes and dreams are being invested in Jacinda to make that change as the avatar for said change.

And that’s where the daffodils come in because after the long winter of discontent that has been the current National government, Jacinda (and by proxy Labour) are the daffodils of change poking through the cold soil and reaching up for the warm bright future above.

SUMMARY

I am willing to admit that I do not have a time machine (yet) nor is what I write 100% guaranteed but at this time I am 95% certain that this is the outcome as instead of my usual rigorous analysis I am going on gut instinct and wild inspiration, which at this time is seems to be the right way to deal with the stultifying deadlock that the capricious nature of Winston Peters and FukYoo Politix has inflicted on this election.

In a situation where no choice is clear it is better to make one’s own fate and cut through the Gordian knot that this election has become.

Do you think its wishful thinking on my part?

Let’s see come September the 24^th.

*-Now I just find it on top of the duvet, looking at me with eyes that say “one word: plastics”.

KP Repost: Many waka, one star to guide them: The Maori Party as a vehicle for Maori politics

This is the last of the KP reposts for now as we have run out of political parties (bar one) to repost and I am working on the Gareth Morgan/TOP one at this time.

In the 10 months since I wrote this and today little has changed in the public space visa a vis the political prospects for any Maori political party except that The Maori Party and Mana are still hanging in there and had a brief surge in the polls a few months back where they jumped to 4% (up from 1% or less) before slumping back to 1% a month later.

And while housing, immigration, the environment, badly behaved politicians and all the rest get time in the media Maori politics and issues usually do not. 

This is, in part, because the ruckus around Waitangi Day this year seemed to present things as a tangled web of conflicting views and voices that had no hope of being solved but mostly because the NZ media just does not cover Maori political issues like every other political (or potentially political) issue.

In in the last 10 months I have taken every opportunity I had to talk to people (Maori and Pakeha) about their views on the situation and while there were no common positions one common theme kept coming up: the gap between tribal and urban Maori and where the wealth from the Treaty of Waitangi really seems to be going (read: the tribal elites).

Its not an issue I am going to get into now but its definitely one I am interested in because with NZ being run by a greedy elite dedicated to slash and burn austerity, benefit the rich only, politics it might make some sense if those ideas ideas and views might proliferate in the tribal elites as well.

But the issue in this post is can Mana/Maori make something of their alliance in this election and the 4% jump a while back indicated that there is potential but its needs to be on polling day to have any effect.

I like the fact that Tuku Morgan has a plan but its the execution of that plan I think might be at fault and the current mood of the electorate is all about punishing the old and arrogant while rewarding whatever populist speaker who shouts the loudest and nothing I have seen indicates that Maori are immune to that particular mood or that Tuku has figured out how to crank up such a populist stance.

Also this is the most famous post I ever wrote for KP as it ended up being part of one of Bryce Edwards political roundups; my proudest moment as a blogger.

This post has taken a while to write, mostly because there was not much to actually write about without straying into territory that was a lot deeper than I wished to go (something Chris Trotter noted recently in the media) but also because the subject in question, the Maori Party, has not been around as long as most of the other political parties and as such does not have as much of a history that people might want to read about in a blog post such as this.

But things have taken a turn recently and there has been a spate of activity within the party and the subsequent media focus, so suddenly there has been a lot more material to work with which means that a post I was putting off can now be completed.

To begin the recent outburst of media activity seems to relate to the party gearing up for the election in 2017 with the olive branch being extended to Hone Harawira and Mana, the Maori King saying he would not vote Labour and the party refusing to support Helen Clark’s bid for UN secretary general.

Whose behind all this seems to be Tukoroirangi (Tuku)Morgan, through his election as the president of the party. Morgan was previously an adviser to the Maori King (which goes a long way to explaining why the King might suddenly bag Labour in his speech) and his recent comments in the media about rebuilding the party and winning back all seven Maori electorate seats from Labour fit in nicely with the current tone of the messages the party is sending.

All of this is a clear signal that Labour won’t be able to count on the support of the Maori Party come the next election (something which John Key has welcomed) and that the party wishes to re-build the bridges with Harawira (something which Key has not welcomed) and that that the losses of Pita Sharples and Tariana Turia in leadership have not been made good with the addition of Tu Ururoa Flavell or Marama Fox.

And part of the problem with the party is leadership. Flavell and Fox have not really filled the shoes left by Sharples and Turia (at least not yet) and it looks like the task has fallen on Morgan’s shoulders to do the strategic thinking for them. It’s not that Fox and Flavell are doing a bad job steering the party’s ship but for a party becalmed in the polls and electorate there has to be more than a steady as she goes approach on the tiller**.

Currently the party has two MPs in parliament by virtue of Flavell winning the Maori electorate seat of Waiariki and bringing Fox in with him as a list MP. All of the six remaining Maori electorate seats are currently in Labour hands.

In the polls, the party has languished around the 1% mark for so long that they are now in the same position as Peter Dunne and United Future; reliant on a single seat in marginal circumstances for access to parliament.

Policy wise the party can claim to have had some successes with Whanau Ora programme and related funding aspects and while there have been some minor successes in respect to their other policy planks (health especially but also in housing, employment and family violence) these have yet to translate into either the general or Maori electorates, as increases in their polling.

Another problem is that there have been nearly a dozen different vehicles for Maori politics in the last 45 years. From Labour in the 80s (until the fallout over the economic reforms), to NZ First in 96 (when the scooped all Maori electorate seats), to the various splinter parties that formed out of the Tight Five when they left NZ First to a range of others (including representation in ACT and National (although how genuine these were is questionable)) which makes the Maori Party just the current vehicle in a long list of vehicles for representing Maori in Parliament.

So at this time Morgan’s actions to beef the party up are definitely needed but have yet to show any fruit.

Nothing seems to have come out of their overtures to Mana (and given Hone Harawira’s dislike of National and the Maori party’s alliance with them as well as the internal squabbles which lead to him leaving and forming Mana (now dead in the polls after its bizarre alliance with Kim Dotcom) it seems that the band will not be getting back together soon.

The attacks on Labour also may yet backfire given that the majority of the Maori electorate seems to prefer Labour to the Maori Party at this time and how much influence the Maori King has is not currently clear. Perhaps in time his words will have an effect but the issue may be less the message and more the medium (the King) as in other countries, royalty usually tries to appear neutral or apolitical for good reason (that being that once you choose sides its somewhat hard to reverse position and if your horse does not win, then you no longer have friends in the big house).

So 10 out of 10 to Morgan for taking action but minus several million*** for not thinking things through because the real issue, which seems to have dogged the Maori party is somewhat the same as the situation into which they have put the King; that being a partisan one.

The formation of the Maori Party was in direct relation to Labour’s Foreshore and Seabed Legislation in the mid 2000’s and the party remained in opposition until National took power where it decided to throw in its lot with them. This lead to the party getting into government (a definite success) and the previously mentioned policy successes but at the cost of playing the partisan card.

In the case of the other political parties such partisan antics are normal and can be suspended when there is general common ground (the recent security and intelligence legislation is a good example) but since the Maori party is formed around a defined racial and not political core this has issues.

As the parties own goals/kuapapa state, the project of the party is to represent all Maori and to respect all parties but in these circumstances, by coming out swinging at Labour, they have done just the opposite. This is not likely to resonate well with any Maori who have voted Labour (or Green or even NZ First) in either the Maori or general electorates.

And with 16% of the population identifying as Maori and the party’s own 1% polling this means that there are more people this message will drive away than appeal to.

The party’s siding with National has never sat well with many people and Sharples and Turia have defended it in the past by pointing to the successes they achieved only by being in parliament, something which I agree with, but by playing such a partisan position now and signalling no future co-operation with Labour they have (whether they believe it or not) just shifted the party out of the middle and well towards the right.

Now there is no valid argument for saying that National is anti-Maori but it would be hard to defend the range of National government policies which have had negative outcomes for Maori in both the current and previous National Governments.

Conversely there is no real argument to say that Labour is pro-Maori but the biggest bone of contention between Labour and Maori seems to be the previously mentioned foreshore and seabed issue and the biggest reservoir of angst over that seems to be the Maori party itself rather than the Maori electorate.

In short Tuku “underpants” Morgan may have just cut the Maori Party’s throat in a well-meaning but ultimately suicidal plan to bring the party back to life. The party currently lives on Flavells single seat alone and I would bet my bottom dollar that Labour will be campaigning hard in that electorate in 2017 to remove it from him seeing that there is no room for compromise in the other camp.

So come the 2017 election we may see the Maori Party waka run aground on rocks that were on the chart but ignored due to hubris or bad captaining. The problem being that in and of itself the party was one of the better vehicles for bringing Maori issues into parliament than many of the others. The star to which they all steer is always the same but the vehicles do not seem to be able to complete the voyage.

*-knowing my luck probably sooner rather than later.

**-Yes I was trying to pack in as many nautical metaphors as possible.

***-Zaphod Beeblebrox in Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy

The $10,000 dollar question

So what I really want to know is, was it worth it?

One part of me can see that its the right of the Te Tii Marae to charge the media to go on, as far as I can see no one else is being refused entrance and in some ways by not having the media there might help defuse the inevitable scene that Waitangi day usually becomes.

On the other hand they were not banning the media, they were charging it and its the medias right to refuse an obvious attempt at extortion (and they should because once you give in and pay once you will always pay).

Trying to turn Waitangi day into a pay-per-view like the rugby only works if its something that people actually want to see and for most Kiwis Waitangi day is mostly a day off work and not really any positive expression about our nations background.

Certainly we are not glued to our sets or breathlessly waiting for the next article in the media to keep us informed.

At its best Waitangi Day is a day to celebrate our shared history but usually the best is not what Waitangi day is about and its becoming clear that attitudes on both sides of the line are hardening towards the kind of intractability that makes things difficult if not impossible to resolve.

I think that addressing Maori grievance regarding the treaty issues is important but when Maori also make up a large percentage of negative demographics as well (think prison, health, wages etc) then Waitangi is less a day to celebrate and more one to forget because a treaty is usually the document signed to formally end a war and help start build the new peace between former combatants, not be the cause for further conflict.

Unfortunately it seems that the Treaty was singed and that's was it, done and dusted, one part ugly colonial legacy, another endless cause for grievance by tribal leaders but mostly irrelevant to the previously mentioned Maori who are living in poverty and ill circumstance.*

NZ needs a national day but its clear that Waitangi Day is not it.

I know my history on NZ pretty well, I know about the conflict between tribes that lead to the Treaty and the subsequent Land Wars that followed due to expansion by English settlers and I know that despite all attempts by the English to dominate the Maori through force they never succeeded (in large part to Maori being excellent fighters and tacticians) and then the subsequent encroachment by stealth and numbers which finally overwhelmed Maori over time.

I know about the Land marches and Bastion point and the revival of Maori culture and language and all in between.

But what strikes me about all Kiwis regardless of our heritage is that we either have very divergent views on Waitangi and all it represents or treat it as the extra respite from work that it is.

The thing is we cant go back in time and fix things but we keep on trying, there is no forward in this space that is really enduring or constructive if this is still whats happening.

On the other hand I know that a lot of people (Maori included) don't agree with the charge or the attitude of keeping the media out.

So was Te Tii Marae just having a go or trying to make a point, whats going on there?

I do not think Waitangi or our history should be obscured or forgotten but instead its should be acknowledged and be relevant but instead its being ignored and marginalized as an excuse to have an extra day off work and nothing more.

Keeping out media to an event that really only matters to a select few politicians, the media itself and a limited number of interested parties while the rest of the nation enjoys the weather, does some gardening and makes the best use of the extra free time is not a good way to keep an already marginal national holiday relevant.

So was it worth it?

*-Among the Maori that I know and associate with (including those well set inside tribal hierarchy and agencies like Te Puna KOkiri) few see Waitangi as a reason to celebrate outside it being an extra day off for them also.