Neither Labour nor National have survived the revolution that New Zealand had to have

By Chris Trotter*

It is a commonplace of New Zealand political conversations to decry how far the Left has drifted from its origins. Labour, once an unambiguously working-class party, in terms of both its party membership and electoral support base, has morphed into a party dedicated to the ideas and interests of the professional and managerial class. The Greens, formerly an eccentric combination of future-focused technocrats and back-to-nature hippies, has fallen prey to the politics of identity and cultural confrontation.

This ideological and demographic drift is condemned by traditional New Zealand leftists for depriving significant fractions of the electorate, most particularly working-class New Zealanders, of an effective political voice in their nation’s affairs.

Less common, however, is serious political discussion concerning the ideological drift of the New Zealand Right. Indeed, a substantial percentage of those who vote for New Zealand’s right-wing parties would challenge the very notion that they are even slightly motivated by ideological concerns, insisting rather that their electoral choices are dictated by experience and “common sense”. They vote for what “works” in the “real world”. Ideology is for the over-educated and the impractical, a description which, by the reckoning of National, Act, and NZ First voters, fits their left-wing opponents like a glove.

The notion that politics can be conducted successfully without recourse to the tiresome bromides of ideology is one which the Right has promoted for a very long time. As defenders of the status quo, right-wing parties have had no pressing historical reason for suggesting that their fellow citizens inhabit anything other than the best of all possible worlds. What does compel them to action, however, is the prospect of the status quo being upended by the dangerous policies of an ideologically-driven Left.

Certainly it was the Right’s fear of what the newly-elected Labour Party might do to the status quo that prompted the formation of the National Party in 1936. Since Labour’s constitution explicitly committed its members to “the socialisation of the means of production, distribution and exchange” the Right’s fear was not without justification.

What it took National more than a decade to grasp was that when the status quo included worldwide economic depression, acute social deprivation and growing political polarisation, identifying one’s party with its defence was unlikely to bring electoral success.

It was only when, after fourteen years in office, Labour’s reforms had become the status quo that National was able to win office by promising to maintain it more efficiently than its ageing creators.

Labour’s welfare state would not be abolished by National, and the powerful trade union movement which Labour had established as its principal defender would not be dismantled (as National’s 1949 manifesto promised) merely disciplined.

What the First National Government’s ruthless disciplining of the militant trade unions in the Waterfront Lockout of 1951 told New Zealanders was that while Labour’s radical revision of the status quo may eventually have become acceptable to farmers and businessmen, anything more than incremental changes to it had not.

Two one-term Labour Governments offered proof of just how averse the National Party was to any serious attempt to move the status quo forward. And not just National. A majority of the New Zealand electorate was similarly unenthusiastic about shaking things up too much.

This was particularly evident following the first great oil-shock of 1973.

A more adroit Labour Party might have parlayed the consequent inflationary surge into an argument for rethinking fundamentally the way the New Zealand economy was run, but the sudden death of Norman Kirk in 1974 had robbed it of the only left-wing politician capable of making that case.

What New Zealand got instead was Rob Muldoon, the National leader who not only defended the post-war status quo but fetishised it. Even when the second oil-shock of 1978, followed by the 1979 Iranian Revolution, forced Muldoon into adopting a left-wing industrial development strategy, National remained committed to “New Zealand the way YOU want it.”

By 1984, however, it was clear that the post-war status quo had run its course. Equally clear was the fact that the Left was in full retreat globally. The parliamentary leadership of the New Zealand Labour Party no longer believed it was either sensible, or possible, to advance the ideology of social-democracy any further.

Encouraged by their Treasury advisers, Labour’s leaders opted instead to blow up the status quo altogether. The whole notion of an active New Zealand state, the idea that had dominated the country’s politics since the election of the Liberal Government in 1890, was cast aside in favour of laissez-faire capitalism.

To paraphrase the Australian Labor finance minister Paul Keating, this was the revolution that New Zealand had to have. But like all revolutions it broke most of the individuals and institutions responsible for its success.

Labour was shattered by “Rogernomics”, as was National. Both parties were the product of New Zealand’s enduring national project: by turns advancing the social-democratic programme that lay at its core, and then, however grudgingly, entrenching and defending those advances once they’d been achieved.

New Zealanders were “socialists of the heart” if not of the head, and that is how they voted. Asking them to become free market predators red in tooth and claw more-or-less overnight was a recipe for extreme ideological volatility and the loss of social cohesion.

This turning away from social-democracy is much more jarring for those nostalgic for the Labour Party of Savage, Fraser, Nash, Nordmeyer and Kirk. A more honest Labour Party would have ditched the name, but the electoral inertia it encouraged was far too valuable to relinquish. The Labour brand has kept the once proud standard-bearer of the New Zealand Left competitive – even at the cost of burning-off those who recognise an empty signifier when they see one.

National, meanwhile, has never wholly adjusted to its new role of promoting a status quo that most New Zealanders don’t support and are eager to change. Like Labour, National is required to go on stroking the electoral cat from its tail to its head. After more than 40 years, both parties have amassed a fine collection of scars and scratches to prove it.

Neoliberalism is a hard sell: crisis-prone and guaranteed to make the lives of ordinary people worse, not better, especially if they’re young. That said, neither of the major parties feels able to break away from the system which the revolution of the 1980s and 90s locked into place. It remains a brute fact of political life to which even the minor parties must adapt or die. 

That the fundamental economic settings cannot be changed explains in large measure the absurd battles over identity and culture that pass for politics in the Twenty-First Century. Fighting over the things they cannot change is all that remains for politicians after they have surrendered any hope of changing the things they can.

*Chris Trotter has been writing and commenting professionally about New Zealand politics for more than 30 years. He writes a weekly column for interest.co.nz. His work may also be found at http://bowalleyroad.blogspot.com.