Bill Sutton: Little should get some credit for Labour's success

Bill Sutton

There were at least six key political leaders who deserve praise for their contributions to the 2017 election campaign.

Several of them have received scant acknowledgement, some of them have given more attention than they probably deserved, but together they delivered us the most interesting New Zealand election of my lifetime.

I want to focus on arguably the most important of the six leaders, and certainly the one who has been least acknowledged by the news media: Andrew Little. He became the next Labour Party leader almost by default after several others had been tried and then failed.

As leader he immediately set about his top priority tasks of firstly shutting down the Labour caucus, responsible for most of Labour's years of instability, and secondly resolving some long-standing issues.

Here Little's experience as a tough former trade union leader, rather than a career politician, was a huge strength.

First he picked a suitable scapegoat, the previous Labour leader David Cunliffe, and demoted him to the furthest reaches of the back bench, a public humiliation. Little then immediately let it be known there would be no way back: Cunliffe was history. This despite the fact he had been the only caucus member who publicly advocated for Little to be next in line.

This kind of behaviour is brutal, but in the political situation Little faced it was essential: he had to let the other caucus members know, in no uncertain terms, they had better not step out of line while he was the leader, or they would be next.

This message was most certainly received: there was plenty of private grumbling by Labour MPs about Little as leader, but none dared to challenge him.

Secondly Little dealt with some long-standing issues, including forging a binding agreement that Labour would work hand-in-glove with the Green Party in the lead-up to the 2017 election.

This had a dramatic effect on both Green and Labour attitudes to each other. The long-standing competition for left-of-centre votes did not disappear, but it was now balanced by equally strong incentives to co-operate. We saw this very clearly during the election campaign.

And when Metiria Turei made her terrible mistake, destroying her own career, virtually all the formerly Green voters who changed their votes switched to Labour.

Lastly, much earlier than was has been reported, Little took a cool hard look at what the polls were saying and acknowledged, perhaps to himself alone in the first instance, that he couldn't be the one to win this election for Labour.

The voters were looking for something new, and long-serving senior Labour MP Annette King, as Labour's deputy leader, could not fill that role either. It would have to be somebody both younger and sexier, and we all know who that was.

So Little very tactfully let King know a change was required: so tactfully in fact the news media kept reporting it as King's decision rather than Little's. But King promptly resigned, and Jacinda Adern was equally promptly chosen to replace her.

There is much more that could be said about the five other key leaders, but since most of this has already been reported by the news media, I'll simply name them in what I consider to be their order of importance: Jacinda Adern, Winston Peters, Metiria Turei, James Shaw, and Bill English.

Bill Sutton was Labour MP for the former Hawke's Bay electorate and later served as a Hawke's Bay regional councillor.
Views expressed here are the writer's opinion and not the newspaper's. Email: editor@hbtoday.co.nz