OPINION
History is meant to repeat first as tragedy, then as farce.
Labour’s justice reset progressed the other way.
Beginning with the farce of Prime Minister Chris Hipkins and Minister for Children Kelvin Davis not knowing the most basic details of the first two instalments in a trilogy of justice announcements last week, and ending with the tragedy of Justice Minister Kiri Allan - the one bright light of the reset - finding herself at the Wellington Central Police station on Sunday night.
It was a Benny Hill kind of farce with Labour promising to get tough on crime, and ending up getting tough on one of its own ministers.
Allan’s fall has briefly taken the political focus away from the bigger challenge of the weekend, the shooting of two construction workers in Auckland. The gunman, Matu Tangi Matua Reid, was on electronic monitoring at the time. He’d attacked a woman in the house where he was living, leaving her with a fracture in a bone of her neck as a result of Reid strangling her.
The circumstances of the Auckland attack raise three immediate questions: whether the policing of the incident was lacking?; how Reid obtained a firearm, and whether he should have been on home detention or serving his sentence in jail?
All of these questions will be answered in some way in the 11 weeks prior to polling day.
The answer to the first seems to be an emphatic “no”, the police acted quickly and with great bravery. The answer to the second is difficult to ascertain. Dangerous people who want a gun will, with enough effort, usually be able to obtain one, but with Labour staking a significant amount of its reputation on its tightening of gun laws, and Act arguing these are at turns unnecessary and incompetently executed, expect this question to be hotly contested.
The third question is the only one we can begin to answer now.
It suggests another justice reset - the third this year - could be in the offing, this time tightening up rules around home detention.
Reid’s sentencing judge started with a three-year jail sentence, but applied a 25 per cent discount for his guilty plea, and another nine months for his background factors, youth and expressions of remorse.
That took him to an end sentence of 20 months in prison, under the 24-month threshold where home detention becomes an available alternative for judges.
National is currently taking aim at these discounts, but its policy of capping them at 40 per cent of the original sentence wouldn’t have changed a thing, as Reid’s sentence in this case came in at under 40 per cent of the original sentence.
There will naturally be pressure on both parties to look at tightening this further. The obvious solution is looking at tweaks to the 24-month (two-year) threshold at which home detention becomes an available alternative for judges.
For Labour the problem of crime is existential. Not just because it threatens to cost the party the election, but for the way it divides Labour’s caucus against itself.
Neither of the election’s two policy battlefields, the economy and law and order, are particularly hospitable to Labour. An election framed as a referendum on excessive locking down and insufficient locking up, is not one Labour is particularly well disposed to fight.
Law and order is a more challenging problem for Labour than the economy. The economy is a matter of taste. Labour, as the name suggests, is unified by a particular economic worldview (David Parker excepted).
Perspectives on law and order differ more sharply. They divide the party from supporters, from the public and MPs from each other.
Labour found itself in a particularly benign political environment in 2020. Its science-based Covid-19 policy was successful, and popular, contrasting with National’s unpopular economic populism. Labour cleverly allied itself to the scientific community, giving its manifesto an intellectual alibi not just for Covid policy, but for everything else.
On law and order, the roles are reversed, with Labour torn between the softer, more rehabilitative approach favoured by its intellectual base, and the tougher, carceral approach favoured by the opposition.
In 2020-2021, health experts lambasting Covid policy was the kiss of death. This year, experts venting liberal outrage over law and order policy proves it’s hit the populist sweet spot.
Shamelessly chasing a populist law and order policy undermines Chris Hipkins and Labour’s Covid-earned scientific bona fides, exposing the party’s 2020 marriage of science and policy as one of convenience. Less science-based policy, than populism with a scientific alibi.
This division exists between Labour and the electorate, where the Ipsos Issues Monitor Poll gives National and Act an 18-point lead over the Greens and Labour (versus just an 8-point lead on the economy).
It also exists within the Labour caucus and Cabinet, which is reckoning with how far the party needs to pivot right to neutralise law and order, and what that means for the party.
Some MPs see a linear relationship between tightening the screws on law and order policy and the incarceration of communities from which Labour sources support.
Labour needs to find a way to keep these communities together. It cannot feed its base to increasingly hostile marginal voters, whose frustrations Hipkins gave voice to last week.
The party had had some success with this before.
Veterans of Labour’s 2005 victory, which involved messy and unpopular compromises on the Closing the Gaps agenda for Māori and the Foreshore and Seabed legislation controversy, will say that each of those compromises was worth the narrow victory the party won over Don Brash’s National Party.
But it’s worth remembering that those compromises gave birth to the Māori Party, which has been a persistent electoral headache for Labour since it was founded, a headache that persists to this day with Te Pāti Māori now indispensable to a putative third-term Labour government, despite the animosity that exists between the two parties and the lack of common policy on almost anything.
The divisions between the three left-wing parties, particularly Labour and Te Pāti Māori, makes it seem increasingly doubtful Labour will find a way to win the election on a policy platform that would keep its likely coalition together.
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