If Labour wants the votes needed to win, its lanyard-wearing professionals need to be on-tap, not on-top

By Chris Trotter*

The New Zealand left has a problem it needs to address urgently – but can’t. That is to say, it could, but if it made a serious attempt to address the problem, then the problem, far from being resolved, would immediately become larger and even more unaddressable.

In the simplest terms, the Left’s problem is that a huge portion of its vote comes from that part of the population whose primary focus is pursuing and/or protecting their own and their family’s economic security.

Consider the disproportionate share of the votes cast in the urban electorates of South and West Auckland that goes to the Labour Party. Huge numbers of poorly paid, precariously employed, unemployed, or out-of-the-workforce-altogether voters tick Labour because it is the party they have been raised to identify as their “friend”.

This identification of Labour as “their” party is particularly strong among the South Auckland Pasifika community. In a country where migrants are all-too-easily persuaded that they have come (or their parents came) to a country in which people like themselves are not much respected or valued – except as a source of cheap labour – the “party of the workers” has always (Labour’s complicity in the infamous “Dawn Raids” of 1975-76 notwithstanding) looked like the South Auckland migrant communities’ best bet.

In the seats of West Auckland Labour is still able to rely on a sizeable Māori vote – although not as sizeable as it used to be. Increasingly, Māori are dissolving the strong political bonds which the Ratana Movement’s 1930s alliance with Labour was able to forge between exploited Pakeha and expropriated Māori.

The consciousness of being tangata whenua, of having a unique and indissoluble relationship with “Aotearoa” (as opposed to the “settler state” of New Zealand) which has been gathering pace since the 1970s, has weakened the perception of a common class interest between Māori and Pakeha Labour voters.

That solidaristic relationship contributed more to the left-wing politics of 1945-1991 than is generally recognised. Māori workers supplied the militant backbone of the post-war trade union movement.

Labour’s 2004 decision to legislate over the judgement of the Court of Appeal in relation to the foreshore and seabed further weakened the bond between the Māori vote and Labour. That Helen Clark’s decision to nationalise the foreshore and seabed prompted the creation of the Māori Party (Te Pāti Māori) only highlighted the internal stresses that had been fracturing the Left since the “Rogernomics Revolution” of the mid-1980s.

For Labour, keeping faith with both its Pakeha and its Māori working-class voters is becoming increasingly difficult.

And it’s not getting any easier. Labour’s “problem” is that it cannot initiate any serious attempt to consolidate and/or win back its Pakeha working-class supporters – a group which now includes an increasing number of retired working-class men and women – without alienating an electorally significant number of its other great source of electoral support, New Zealand’s professionals and administrators.

On the face of it, the idea of professionals and administrators lining up behind the Labour Party is counterintuitive. Prior to World War II, professionals, managers, and administrators were overwhelmingly aligned with the Right. Lawyers, doctors, company managers and public servants saw themselves as, and were, unapologetic defenders of the status-quo.

And so were their children. When riots erupted along the length of Auckland’s Queen Street in the sugarbag winter of 1932, it was the student body of the University of Auckland that volunteered to become “Special Constables” and put the unemployed back in their place.

The extraordinary expansion of tertiary education in post-war New Zealand changed all that. Tens-of-thousands of the young New Zealanders born in the twenty years after 1945 began pouring into the new brutalist tower-blocks raised above the faux medievalist architecture of New Zealand’s original, elite-oriented, university campuses.

Raised in an era of unprecedented and extended material prosperity, the students of the 1960s and 70s arrived on campus brimming with the moral optimism of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, afire with the idealism of Dr Martin Luther King, and determined to change the world. (Soundtrack supplied by Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Scott McKenzie, Janis Joplin, and Pink Floyd.)

If the unemployed had rioted down Queen Street in those golden years, then the students at the University of Auckland would have been much more likely to join them than beat them. The images of young French workers and students standing shoulder-to-shoulder in the mass upheavals of Paris ‘68 gave rise to all manner of revolutionary fantasies.

By no means all of these young idealists, but enough of them, would not only end up voting for the Labour Party but joining it. Not as fellow workers, you understand, but as credentialled beneficiaries of the post-war welfare state. Teachers, social workers, health professionals, public servants: the people destined to speak those nine in/famous words:

“Were from the government and we’re here to help.”

Experts who saw themselves on-top rather than on-tap. (Has anyone come up with a better description of Roger Douglas’s revolutionaries?)

The dream of students and workers fighting alongside each other for socialism and freedom did not long survive the Fourth Labour Government’s laying-waste of the social-democratic society created by the First.

The New Zealand working-class was decimated. The Labour Party split. And the people who now occupy its Twenty-First Century ruins wear lanyards, volunteer their pronouns, and keep the world safe for the “loose affiliation of millionaires and billionaires” who own it.

This is Labour’s problem. Its working-class electoral base is a wasting asset. It’s two largest active components, Pasifika and Māori voters, are becoming less reliable with every election cycle. The days when “the big South Auckland booths” could pull Labour’s electoral irons out of the fire (as they did in 2005) are long gone.

The more Labour strives to keep Māori and Pasifika voters onside (i.e. the more tax dollars it transfers to them) the more its ageing cohorts of working-class Pakeha feel inclined to look elsewhere for a congenial political home.

“Gidday Winston!”

Which only confirms the professionals and administrators suspicion that an unhealthily large number of Labour’s legacy voters are a deplorable collection of racists, misogynists, homophobes, transphobes, and “Far-Right” neo-fascists.

In no uncertain terms they inform the Labour Party that if it shows the slightest inclination to pander to these reactionary prejudices, then they will instantly defect to the Greens.

Such is Labour’s dilemma. A turn towards the working-class – and its values – will provoke a mass desertion of its “progressive” (a.k.a. “Woke”) professionals and administrators to the Greens (or the Opportunity Party). But unless Labour is able to attract, in decisive numbers, disillusioned Pasifika, angry Māori and Pakeha workers, and retired former-Labour defectors to NZ First and National, the numbers simply will not be there to diminish National’s huge swag of electorates, let alone push up Labour’s nationwide support towards 40 percent.

This is the core paradox that lies at the heart of Labour’s Problem. The only available alternative (apart from retreating into non-voting) for those who refuse to countenance the radical social-engineering so dear to the hearts of Labour’s, the Greens’ and Opportunity’s professionals and administrators, is to cast their votes for right-wing parties that will, at the very least, refrain from passing legislation requiring New Zealanders to accept – with enthusiasm – that 2 + 2 = 5.

In order to restore Labour’s commitment to social-democracy, and hence its electability, it has become necessary to keep it out of office until such time as its social-liberal faction either abandons its on-top, top-down agenda – or departs the party.

*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.