Centrist drift means ‘no one to vote for’
relate to the people she met through Auckland Action Against Poverty.
Despite never wanting to talk about mental health again after Danny’s death, she took on the portfolio for 10 years in Parliament.
“I can see that really nothing has changed and if anything it may have got worse since the 1990s,” she says.
“I often end up thinking that the system is just relieved when people die, because it’s one less cost to their budget. It’s a brutal system.”
It is one her great regrets that she was never able to enact major, structural changes to mental health, welfare or housing while in Parliament.
Never one to sit back, she recently completed a PhD on the absence of a left-wing think tank in New Zealand, and has duly set about filling that gap with her own organisation. Constant Radical: The Life and Times of Sue Bradford Release date: June 29, 2017 Fraser Books RRP$39.50 Sue Bradford is downplaying the possibility of an unlikely political comeback.
But she has revealed that her think-tank, Economic and Social Research Aotearoa (Esra), is actively discussing a new, far-left political party.
The party, or parties, could be in place by the 2020 election.
Bradford said that there was no longer representation for the radical left wing in New Zealand, and Esra is hoping the gap could be filled.
“There are so many people in this country now who have no party to vote for,” she told the Herald.
“The disenfranchised, unemployed and beneficiaries. People on low or no incomes, people shifting between jobs. They can see that Labour and the Greens are really with business. They’re confined in what they will do.”
Whether she will lead a new party or run as a candidate is still unknown.
“I’m not young,” she said. “And the leadership of future parties must really come from young people.”
Bradford left the Greens in 2009 after a decade in Parliament, deeply upset at missing out on the coleadership to Metiria Turei. She said that was another step in the party’s drift to the centre, which began with the sudden death of former co-leader Rod Donald in 2005.
The Greens had “joined the community of suits” she said, pointing to the selection of former businessman James Shaw as coleader in 2015 and the recently- released set of fiscal responsibility guidelines.
The Budget Responsibility Rules were “the last straw” for her, she said.
“And I know some Greens have left the party because of it. Because it was such a signal that they wanted to work completely within the confines of neoliberal capitalism.”
Mana’s potential as a far-left party “went to dust” when it joined with Kim Dotcom’s Internet Party, she said. She intended to run as a Mana candidate in 2014 but quit after the merger.
Bradford said she didn’t vote in 2014 because there was “no one to vote for”. She is likely to do the same thing in September.
“I don’t buy the argument that you just go for the least worst party. Because it only encourages them.”