The resignation of New Zealand Prime Minister John Key has
been greeted on the left as if the wicked witch of the west suddenly saw the
error of her ways and disappeared in a puff of green smoke. The sneering and
the sarcasm has reached a crescendo of vituperativeness reflecting the
perceived role of John Key as chief Satan of the right wing. Now, perhaps, the
left imagines it has a chance to assemble its rag tag opposition and strike
back at the evil empire.
Let me suggest that that is because the left has become
profoundly stupid.
Not only that, the left’s hatred of John Key is because he
represents everything they are not. In a word – effective.
Don’t hide! Don’t imagine I am such National stooge here to
sing the government’s praises. I’m not. The National government has extended
and continued Helen Clark’s unwitting legacy of smashing the working classes by
undermining wages and subsidising petty property capitalism to an appalling degree.
The National government has presided over policies of rampant hypocrisy in
order to subsidise farmers (e.g OSH and the ETS), and it’s management of the
earthquake disasters has been bumbling, protracted and inept. The National government
has plans to waste a sixth of this nation’s annual GDP on defence over the next
twenty years, and it’s notions of industrial development are simply archaic,
compared to our competitor nations.
But the left are so distracted by bitchery and political
correctness that they have done nothing, I repeat nothing, to counter the
impression that National are ‘a safe pair of hands’.
Let’s start with the most obvious issue confronting New
Zealand: unaffordable property prices. What would labour or the greens do to
change that? No, don’t look it up. If they were doing their jobs you would
know, right now. What, apart from bluster, apart from flip-flop on capital
gains taxes, specifically will the left do? Don’t know? Neither do I.
OK, what about immigration? Right now there are Indian “students”
and Vanuatuan fruit pickers working in New Zealand because, according to business,
“New Zealanders don’t want to work”. What
they really mean is New Zealanders don’t want to be worked in shoddy, and often
unsafe conditions and be paid (if they are paid) less than the minimum wage. Immigration
is the antidote to wage-price inflation the world over. So what is the left
saying about this? Answer: not much because it doesn’t want to appear racist.
The only reason New Zealand does not follow suit with America
and Britain in plumbing the depths of backlash is that the left has abandoned
the working classes – just as it has in Britain – and there isn’t a party of
the poor willing to articulate a position that resonates with the experience of
poor New Zealand who would happily take wage inflation over property price
inflation any day.
Instead the left’s strategy has been to attack John Key.
But while the Key government has presided over a slow moving
avalanche of inequality it has also been very effective. Over the next few
years billions of dollars worth of infrastructure projects will come on stream
transforming our main cities. Pointy headed left wing fringe dwellers may think
this is a terrible thing but the average family will simply like new stuff that
makes their cities work better. The Key government has also presided over huge
investment in schools, including new buildings, new broadband internet and improvements
to the NCEA process which now means that 83.3% of eighteen year olds have level
two NCEA qualifications thanks to better integration of trades training into
the secondary school system.
Bill English has been leading a programme of big
data development to reduce recidivism and crime because the benefit cost ratio
of preventing children growing into criminals is enormous. Rather than treat
the symptoms with armies of corrupt social workers (the recent findings of
Judge Caroline Henwood, suggest a lot of children in care were abused) who
profit from a fat welfare system their approach is to target much more resource
at the most problematic people. Slowly but carefully the Key government has kept
the economy growing while slowing reducing the debts that followed the global
financial crisis, by partially selling state assets rather than fully
privatising them.
Because what the left has failed to see is that the Key
trick is to close down its platforms. Take gender pay inequality. Potentially
it’s a goldmine for the left. Unions have taken cases to the highest courts in
the land and won. A campaign for pay equality would be an easy win for
stretched single female and two person households to boost their incomes but
the opportunity will not arise. Why not? Because the Key government has taken
it over. Expect them to water it down but make an announcement that enables
them to claim the achievement that properly belongs to the Unions.
Every time the left finds a platform the Key government has
snatches it from under them.
This is because the Nats are an effective political machine.
The left aren’t. Key and deputy Bill English have openly talked about the day
they are either kicked out by the electorate and they have been building a deep
bench of experience to replace themselves. By contrast when Clark left power
nearly all Labour’s experience left with her. The same is true of the greens
who struggle to rise above the level of nutty amateurs. The result is
factionalism and loss of coherence. The left don’t look like a government in
waiting. They look like one red faced man shouting a lot, half the time at his
own side to get into line.
Because the left has had such leadership problems of its own
they have imagined that their task is toppling National’s leader. Now that John
Key has toppled himself they are going to find out how wrong they have been.
It’s not about a leader, it’s about a team. Come next
November electors will have this choice. A coherent team of a government that
has brought most of them a near doubling of their net worth, or a messy
cacophony of voices including Andrew Little, the greens and Winston Peters who
can’t even come up with a cohesive economic strategy let alone communicate it.
The left has nobody to blame for its lack of appeal but
itself. Hopefully now it will forget about John Key and get its act together as
it should have started to do two years ago.
