All posts tagged "labour party"

Reading the tea leaves at the Labour Party conference

Monday, November 19 2012

My diminishing pool of regular readers know I don't really do political blogging these days, despite having a politics tag.

I was at this weekend's conference, and I've been surprised by some of the strong claims people are making about what happened.

So here's a few notes on some propositions I've heard asserted.

A 40% trigger is democratic/undemocratic

This depends entirely on how you choose to understand the impact of the rule.

Clearly, an end result is most democratic if it involves everyone. And with a lower trigger, it is more likely that there will be a process that involves everyone. Seen this way, a lower trigger fosters democracy.

On the other hand, within the caucus, a lower trigger hands power to a minority of caucus. In most democratic cultures, a simple majority is taken as the will of the whole. Seen this way, a lower trigger is undemocratic as it is against majority rule in the body where the vote takes place. Within the context of caucus, this is undemocratic.

I see merit in both these arguments and I'm not going to call their advocates bad people for disagreeing with me.

People who voted against the trigger hate democracy and the party

So, if we can disagree about what democracy demands, then we can't agree with this proposition unless we say "they hate MY version of democracy." And of course, people who think stability is a condition for the success of the party might well choose to make it less democratic and more successful because they love the party.

The vote on the trigger represents the Will Of The Labour Party

With a 27 vote majority out of I think 550 odd delegates at best it represents the will of slightly more than half the delegates, some of whom voted according to instructions from the bodies that sent them and some of whom exercised their conscience on the day.

The vote on the trigger is an expression of support for David Cunliffe

I was there and I talked to a number of people I am convinced sincerely believed that it represented maximally democratic option. I also know there was some heavy lobbying by people who are strong Cunliffe supporters.

So there was an unknown mix of motivations, no doubt some who thought only of democracy, some who thought only of Cunliffe, and some who thought of both. We don't know how those motivations were distributed among the delegates, or what arguments from whom led to those motivations. Therefore we can't infer that The Will Of The Labour Party is David Cunliffe. In fact as long as 15 delegates who supported the 40% trigger were motivated only by democratic arguments, then Cunliffe was supported by less than half the delegates... unless you think that some Cunliffe supporters voted against 40%, which is inconsistent with the claim that the trigger vote is an expression of support for Cunliffe.

We don't know why people voted for the lower trigger, and therefore we cannot say we know what that vote expresses about the intent of the voters or the party at large, however we might define that.


I think if people are going to argue about what happened, and about the meaning of what is going to happen, we should reflect on the difference between what we know and what we wish was so. And that goes for everyone.

I'm discouraged by the conviction with which journalists report their opinions as fact, and I'm equally discouraged by the way political bloggers and commentators have done the same, building on the journalists' reports. The Cunliffe vs Shearer story and the 40% vs simple majority story are intertwined, but they are not the same, yet we can't be sure where and how they overlap. I know I'm going to give a lot more credit to analysis that acknowledges these uncertainties instead of glossing over them for the sake of a clear story.

PS: there were some important constitutional changes on Saturday that will have major long term effects on the character of the party, but you won't read about them in any article I have read from a regular journalist so far.

PPS: to be very clear about my motivations, I think I sit near the left end of the party's policy spectrum. I don't see either Shearer or Cunliffe as sincere advocates for strong left policies, although I appreciate Cunliffe and this weekend Shearer have both courted that constituency, which is nice. Count me out of either camp, I have other goals in the party than getting my man or woman at the top.

Responses: 2 comments Tags: politicslabour partynews media


Wednesday, February 10 2010

From Public Address System:

Stephen Judd
Posted at 4:42PM on 9 Feb 10.
Also, I'm very attached to NZ, but frankly [Bernard Hickey] has a point. I don't believe Aussies en masse are any smarter than we are, but they seem to have made a much better fist of economic management in the last 25 years than we have.

Matthew Poole
Posted at 4:49PM on 9 Feb 10.
"[Australians] seem to have made a much better fist of economic management in the last 25 years than we have."

More that, for whatever reason, they got lucky with electing leaders who didn't have stealth objectives, in either direction, who could then gut the country. We got Rogernomics by stealth, we got the last National government's hard-right positions on welfare, state enterprise and employment relations by stealth, and we currently have a spineless merchant banker who's blind in one eye and can't see out the other because he hid his true colours behind a façade of "Mr Middle New Zealand".

For better or worse, Australia's leaders appear to have been quite up-front about their aspirations and positions, and the Australians have been able to go to elections on the basis of what's really going to happen to their country.

Capitalist Realism, Mark Fisher:

... the so-called anti-capitalist movement seemed also to have conceded too much to capitalist realism. Since it was unable to posit a coherent alternative political-economic model to capitalism, the suspicion was that the actual aim was not to replace capitalism but to mitigate its worst excesses; and, since the form of its activities tended to be the staging of protests rather than political organisation, there was a sense that the anti-capitalism movement consisted of making a series of hysterical demands which it didn't expect to be met. (p14)


While French students can still be found on the streets protesting aginst neoliberalism, British students, whose situation is incomparably worse [than the French] seem resigned to their fate. But this, I want to argue, is a matter not of apathy, nor of cynicism, but of reflexive impotence. They know things are bad, but more than that, they know that they can't do anything about it. But that 'knowledge', that reflexivity, is not a passive observation of an already existing state of affairs. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy. (p21)

A little chat today:

Stephen Judd: we all think pols are lying bastards, right?
JM: uh huh
Stephen Judd: and people don't join parties
Stephen Judd: instead, they see parties as offering a menu of policies
Stephen Judd: which you will consume with your vote
JM: yep
Stephen Judd: this actually greatly favours status quo capitalism
Stephen Judd: 1. status quo has money for advertising
Stephen Judd: 2. because there is no grassroots organising/participation, it's the advertising that swings votes
JM: certainly 2 seems right
JM: and can't argue with 1
Stephen Judd: 3. and it doesn't matter whether the advertising is true -- it's the policy sizzle, not the sausage
JM: yeah that shits me
Stephen Judd: 4. the less faith people have in politics, the less they want to organise or participate
Stephen Judd: 5. protest is effectively theatre which assumes in essence that organising is doomed
JM: yeah definitely
JM: particularly of late, yees
Stephen Judd: so 6. protests actually support the status quo since they assume their own failure
Stephen Judd: etc etc
Stephen Judd: so anyway
JM: i wonder what the labour party is made up of these days

Stephen Judd: Gio turned me on to this book -- -- which is giving me a lot of ideas at the moment
Stephen Judd: that's where i absorbed the notion of the uselessness of protest and the pervasive belief ("Capitalist Realism") that the status quo is the only way there is
JM: i think the protest thing is spot on
Stephen Judd: This Fisher dude is switched on, i tell you
Stephen Judd: even if he is a pomo marxist :D

I joined the Labour Party today, and I foresee a lot of meetings in the near future. I have just run out of patience with my own whining about the National government. I cannot think of a recent protest movement in NZ that has achieved its aims (other than the fatuous "raising awareness"). Merely voting is not enough. Organisation and recruitment of like-minded people back into active political life is the way out.

Over the past decade I have had a lot of differences with Labour, and I didn't vote Labour in the last two elections -- I voted Green instead. And yet I don't feel I can join the Greens, with their anti-science outlook and their worrying predilections for conspiracy theories. I could of course join the Greens and attempt to change that from the inside, but if for no other reason than tribal loyalty, I think I'd rather do that in the political movement I was raised in.

Over the life of MMP we've seen that parties that seek to be ideologically purer than the two "big tent" parties wither. The only exceptions have been the Greens, who have more to their ideology than merely being left-wing, and the Māori Party. I think that pushing the boundaries of party policy out away from the "centre" is going to be a more successful strategy than being a small party trying to win a little space on the margin.

(By the way, this post does not signal any transformation into a political blog. It's by way of a reflective note or journal entry, like all the other posts. If I find I have the time and energy for sustained political blogging, it'll be elsewhere.)

Responses: 2 comments Tags: politicslabour partycapitalist realismmark fisher

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