Labour must find path to avoid irrelevance

As he took what is probably the first real holiday of his adult life, Labour leader Chris Hipkins may have felt an unfamiliar feeling: irrelevance. For the past six years, as a senior minister and Prime Minister, everything he did, no matter, how small, mattered a great deal. We agonised over his choice of snacks and soft drinks, his Freudian slip made international headlines, his decision to wear full work attire when giving a press conference while on holiday fuelled many a barbecue chat.

This summer, a rather amusing video of Hipkins being thrown off a sea biscuit, the sort of visual content that is almost lab-grown for light summer media attention, vanished with little mention. His suggested hashtag “#chippieonabikkie” yielded little engagement on Instagram.

You might have thought, as the poor man improbably skimmed across and rolled across the glassy water like a breakdancing Christ, before eventually being dragged under the surface, you were watching a metaphor for his 2023.

As its MPs return for Parliament’s first sitting next year, Labour needs to figure out how to win back that relevancy.

Top of the agenda will be issues relating to Māori as the public processes the fallout from the huiā-motu and Rātana, and gets ready for Waitangi, the time of year when Māori issues are at the top of the agenda.

Labour argued themselves into a corner on Māori policy last term. The party became a price-taker when it comes to Māori policy.

Labour allowed Te Pāti Māori to be the arbiter of the ideal of Māori policy, the price-maker. Te Pāti Māori forced Labour to assume humbling position of offering a watered-down and electable version of whatever its small, nimble cousin can offer. Labour seemed not to understand that any party that got into a bidding war with Te Pāti Māori on Māori-related policy would lose.

Te Pāti Māori is an unusual electoral machine. It’s co-leaders can gasbag on “genocide” and “white supremacy” all the while serving under a president who in 2019 said “Sieg Heil to that” when referring to then-Auckland Mayor Phil Goff who he added “acts like Hitler”. That contradiction would lead some to wonder whether the party has any idea what genocide actually means — but it hasn’t dissuaded its target constituency, people on the Māori roll, who have flocked to the party.

Labour cannot get away with such shenanigans.

Act and NZ First’s respective Treaty policies mean the current parliamentary term is likely to be dominated by Māori-related issues. Labour cannot, and should not, back down from its position at the political vanguard when it comes to championing Māori. To do so would shatter the party. However, the advent of a left-wing Māori Party with a large presence in Parliament does present a challenge that Labour hasn’t faced in some time, if ever (you could argue Mana Motuhake’s presence in the Alliance represented a similar challenge in the 1990s).

If Labour gets into a bidding war with Te Pāti Māori it will repeat the dreadful 2023 result, losing both Māori and non-Māori alike.

The party should think laterally and should avoid asking itself whether it is offering more or less than Te Pāti Māori. A better question is whether it is offering something that is better or worse.

Te Pāti Māori is vulnerable on issues like the economy and trade. Its tax policy at the last election was the most nonsensical (equal perhaps with NZ First) of all parties that entered Parliament. It took Labour’s fairly belt-and-braces wealth tax idea, and amped it up to a level that even wealth tax backers thought would be economically injurious.

MPs from the party have also taken a sceptical line on international trade, a policy that would smash Māori, whose economic interests are heavily geared towards the export-heavy primary and tourism sectors.

Erecting trade barriers and encouraging capital flight would be bad for Māori, but no one in Labour seemed keen to make that case.

Labour’s friends from up the horseshoe, The Greens, are in a Dickensian rut. For them, ‘tis the best of times, ‘tis the worst of times. They have their largest-ever caucus, after their best-ever election result. They crashed out of Government with emissions actually falling and establishing lasting climate legislation. Act, the only parliamentary party to propose getting rid of the Zero Carbon Act, did not get its way in coalition talks.

The biggest problem for the Greens is that they’ve lost two MPs in varying forms of scandal in the past 12 months. There is a whiff of the chaos that engulfed the party during the Metiria Turei affair.

Co-leader James Shaw is widely expected to quit this term, possibly early, giving members the time to replace him before the party’s AGM. When he’s gone, just two of the caucus’ 15 MPs will have had any experience of time in Parliament before the last Labour Government. The caucus is stacked with new or relatively new MPs who only have experience of the Greens in government, if they have any experience at all.

A few in the party anticipate a few months or years of turmoil. This can be healthy. A party has to destroy itself a bit in opposition to resolve the tensions and contradictions built up in government. The Greens made compromises during their stint in government. Members and caucus will need to handwring over whether those compromises were worth it. It’s a grim fact of political life that every phoenix is born from ashes — just ask Christopher Luxon and Judith Collins who stood side-by-side in the Beehive Theatrette this week as if 2021 was just a bad dream.

The party is missing Golriz Ghahraman. Occasionally overshadowed in Parliament by the fact she never displayed leadership ambitions and occupied a small caucus with three ministers, and star Chloe Swarbrick, Ghahraman had a successful two terms and was a skilled parliamentarian.

Her first term was probably the best. She built an unlikely relationship with NZ First MP and Defence Minister Ron Mark, which bore fruit when the Greens sought to restrain some of the more militarist tendencies of their coalition partner.

Along with the strong relationship between NZ First chief of staff Jon Johansson and his Green counterpart Tory Whanau, Ghahraman and Mark’s relationship was one of the vectors of communication that held the Government together as the three parties drifted further apart through 2019 and 2020, to the point where Labour and the Greens would barely speak to NZ First’s leadership.

She scored a parliamentary victory when the Greens decided not to back Labour’s heavy-handed terrorism legislation for returning foreign fighters, forcing Labour to go cap in hand to National for support. When National’s price proved too high, Labour came grovelling to the Greens, and Ghahraman was able to win most of the concessions she wanted.

There was no way she could stay in Parliament following this month’s scandal, but the party will miss her.

The fear for the Greens is that with a very lower-case green caucus, there will be precious few to guide the new crop as they learn the ropes.