Dita De Boni: Little's coalface connection adds kudos

The Labour Party should build on new leader's association with blue collar NZ and make it their strength Andrew Little will have his work cut out uniting Labour's factions. Photo / Mark Mitchell

The Labour Party should build on new leader's association with blue collar NZ and make it their strength.

A successful leader must be able to resonate with the working class and the left-wing intellectual. The votes have been cast, and Andrew Little has won.

The mission now, for the National Party and its many representatives, should it choose to accept it, and it already has, is to convince New Zealand that he represents only a tiny fraction of the population and is doomed to failure.

They have done this pretty successfully so far, convincing even many lefties that Little is a dour, humourless, commie rabble-rouser who hasn't a hope in hell of connecting with the "average New Zealander".

They have every reason to be optimistic about succeeding. After all, they've managed to convince New Zealand that a multi-millionaire investment banker is more down-home Kiwi than jandals, that an agenda of selling off state assets will somehow lead to pennies from heaven for our children's children, and that Simon Bridges has the common touch and charisma needed to become the next great leader of the nation. Wherever black needs to be sold as white, they are there, and they are good.

It's fair to say there are some points of fact about the election of Little as Labour leader that might give pause for thought. He was elected by a slim margin, indeed; he doesn't smile enough yet, and he needs to be far more fluent to the media (his cat may well upstage him at various points); and he will have to deal with factions in the party -- although all political parties have factions, so this is more a reality of politics than something inherently (and only to be found) in Labour.

I note that he is almost always portrayed as a "union man", a "union choice", someone for whom the scary old union movement "voted in lockstep" for -- "a bit like Communism" wrote one gleeful commentator.

The first thing Labour has to do is own this connection and flip the bird to critics, most of whom will never vote Labour in their lives. Unions represent around 300,000 working people of this country and their concerns, and they span a huge number of industries and a large geography. They are genuinely in touch with the coalface of the working poor, not just borrowing their plight as a bit of agitprop as so many in politics have been trained to do.

Little has actually been at this working coalface for most of his career anyhow, eschewing a high-paying job with this or that corporate to live his beliefs, and is better briefed than many others to see how inequality of opportunity plays out for hundreds of Kiwis. To suggest he is out of touch with middle New Zealand concerns is ludicrous.

I had brief dealings with Little many years ago, when he headed the EPMU and represented striking Herald journalists. My desire to keep my current role on this newspaper prevents me from replaying every detail of that stoush, but my impression of Little's conduct during that time was that he was a rock-solid but flexible negotiator, and that our employers also afforded him respect, because he could foot it with CEOs and CFOs. He further impressed me at a subsequent union party, when we were knees-ing it up the way people with little to lose often do, and he kept himself sober, composed and professional at all times, long into the night.

Labour is a broad church. A successful leader must be able to resonate with the working class and the left-wing intellectual. He or she also needs to be calm and rational to appeal to swing voters, cool (or daggy/cool) to cut through to non-voters, and have some experience of business to appeal to captains of industry. This is where Little had it over the other contenders for Labour leader, all of whom have their strengths, but none of whom made a real connection outside their own special interest groups.

Does all this mean Little will make a fabulous leader of the Labour party? There are no guarantees, of course. He's not perfect. He has a formidable adversary in John Key and the National Party machine, and he's also fighting the often self-defeating tendencies of his party itself. But if people can see past the smear machine already cranking into action, and think rationally about what he brings to the table, he may be in with a fighting chance.