Pockets of left voters still lurking in the rural heartland
IT’S one of those facts that stick in the back of your mind. Information that forces you to consider carefully the difference between important and significant. That the event which gave rise to the fact happened 20 years ago does not matter one bit. Some happenings continue to resonate long after their occurrence.
That’s why the leftwing Alliance winning pollingbooths in the TaranakiKing Country towns of Eltham, Stratford and Te Kuiti will always be a fact that counts.
Those small victories remain significant because they show that even in the most conservative of blueribbon electorates there are pockets of leftwing support. Hundreds and, quite possibly, thousands of voters with a radically different take on rural life from the occupational groups that dominate the countryside: farmers, contractors, stockandstation agents, bankers, accountants and agricultural supply companies. Voters who, given the right incentives, could become politically important.
Back in the days of firstpastthepost, noone paid much attention to these voters. Since there were never enough of them to affect the outcome in National’s blueribbon seats, their votes simply were not worth the effort of soliciting. Whether they made it to the pollingbooths was essentially up to them. For the Labour
Party such seats represented little more than useful traininggrounds for ambitious young activists like Helen Clark and Jacinda Ardern (both of whom were blooded in the National Party’s Waikato heartland).
Everything should have changed with the advent of mixed member proportional representation (MMP). The new electoral system, which got its first run in 1996, transformed the country into what was, essentially, a single electorate. Under MMP, every vote cast for a political party counted. It no longer mattered that practically all of your neighbours voted for the Nats because there were plenty of other communities where Labour voters hugely outnumbered supporters of the National Party. Winning under MMP was all about getting every last one of your party’s supporters to a pollingbooth so that their allimportant party votes could be added to the nationwide tally.
The 1998 TaranakiKing Country byelection, necessitated by Jim Bolger’s appointment as New Zealand’s ambassador to the United States, was a politically crucial test for all the political parties represented in Parliament.
As such, voter mobilisation was critical. The Alliance, in particular, was determined to show Labour how far away it still was from recovering its former easy dominance of the leftwing vote.
In the process, the Alliance persuaded upwards of 3000 voters to get themselves to the pollingbooths on its behalf. Who were they? Noone really knows. The hewers of wood and the drawers of water of rural and provincial New Zealand probably: the people you never see on Country Calendar; the ones the cockies and their mates look down their noses at; the men and women who keep the roads passable and serve behind the counter in the local store. Who knew there were so many!
I thought about these voters earlier this week as I watched Jacinda Ardern deliver the LabourNZFGreen Government’s verdict on Mycoplasma bovis. To see a Labour prime minister and the head of Federated Farmers seated sidebyside, united in a common cause, was presumably as jarring for rural and provincial voters as it was for an old socialist like me. It set me to wondering how Labour’s numbers in the Newshub and One News opinion polls might be improved if the party trainedup some organisers and put them to work in all the little country towns studded across this country’s beleaguered dairy heartlands. After all, Jacinda herself was raised in Morrinsville, not Mt Albert. Come to think of it, isn’t Helen Clark a Waikato farmer’s daughter?
There’s a widely held view among farmers (especially dairy farmers) that Labour and the Greens have it in for them. That the Left does not understand what it means to work on the land — just one biosecurity failure away from disaster. Well, there’s some truth to that. And, in many respects, the responsibility for this growing urbanrural split lies with the Left.
The store of leftwing votes in the countryside revealed by the TaranakiKing Country byelection was forgotten about almost as soon as it was discovered. Which was a great pity. Because leftwing Kiwis living in rural and provincial New Zealand have facts to share about life in the countryside: facts their urban comrades urgently need to hear.