It’s not impossible for Labour to win the next election – more than half of respondents to polls say they think the country is heading in the wrong direction. It’s harder to imagine what that government would look like.
Labour’s leader, Chris Hipkins, is a brilliant political operative – a consummate attack politician facing off against an inexperienced and floundering Christopher Luxon.
From a tactical viewpoint, the worst thing Labour could do is get between the unhappy public and their unpopular government and start talking about itself or bickering over arcane tax policies.
It has shown extraordinary self-restraint in avoiding this and voters are rewarding it for it. But one of the weaknesses of the Jacinda Ardern administration was its lack of preparation: it was elected in 2017 with a handful of slogans – 100,000 homes! Light rail! Kindness! – but few coherent policies.
It wasted years groping about for an agenda. To be ready for government, the party needs to develop its ideas across at least three problematic domains – taxation, treaty issues and law and order – any of which could trigger a bitter and public civil war.
In 2017, Ardern pledged to convene a tax working group and implement its recommendations. When the group recommended a capital gains tax, she instantly ruled it out under her leadership.
During Labour’s second term, its revenue minister, David Parker, instructed the Inland Revenue Department to investigate the tax status of the country’s wealthiest individuals and families. It confirmed what many economists already suspected: the rich pay lower tax rates than the rest of us because most of their economic income occurs through capital gains.
For most of Labour’s supporters, Parker’s report was irrefutable proof the party needed to finally fix the tax system. Parker and then finance minister Grant Robertson developed wealth and capital gains policies, but they were unilaterally dumped by Hipkins in favour of his plan to exempt fruit and vegetables from GST. Immediately after the election, Hipkins reassured his party that “all taxes were back on the table” while knocking Parker down to No 19 in the caucus rankings, far from any finance or revenue portfolios.
There’s a simmering, seething anger within some factions of Labour about this sequence of reversals and the cynicism behind them; a deep distrust that a Hipkins-led party will deliver on tax reform even if the party coheres around a policy.
There’s more unanimity about co-governance. Most of the party seems to agree that Māori representation or building parallel, Māori-run organisations to deliver government services is the path forward for the crown to honour the partnership provisions of the Treaty of Waitangi, and that to disagree with this doctrine is racism. But that consensus does not extend to the wider public, many of whom are either opposed to co-governance, confused by it or both.
Co-governance a killer
Would a Labour government reinstate the Māori Health Authority? Would it extend co-governance arrangements to National’s council-controlled organisations, which supplanted Labour’s proposed Three Waters entities? Would it rule out a Māori parliament?
Labour’s candidates in the Māori seats will want strong policies to take to their constituents, but the Ardern and Hipkins tactic of enthusiastically supporting co-governance while refusing to explain it killed them in the general electorates – and they lost the Māori seats anyway.
There’s also a general consensus in Labour that prisons are bad. They don’t work; getting tough on crime is just posturing; banning gang patches is absurd; boot camps don’t work; the state disproportionately incarcerates Māori, perpetuating racism and inequality.
There is much truth to the left-wing critique of the criminal justice system: young offenders sentenced to prison are more likely to become repeat offenders than those given community sentences. But the Ardern-era reduction in the prison population seemed to correlate with increases in violent and sexual offending and a surge in property crime. Law and order is currently the second-highest-ranked issue for voters (cost of living is still No 1).
There’s a lot of talk among the radical left about prison abolition and the Green Party is increasingly abolition-curious – but there’s a vacuum of centre-left policy in this space, other than the usual commitments to “evidence-based” rehabilitation programmes, the efficacy of which is increasingly being called into question.
Labour also faces a deeper challenge shared by left-wing political parties around the world: failure to deliver. Throughout its term, Labour poured money into health, transport, environment and education programmes – with questionable results. Something has gone wrong with the 21st-century administrative state.
A deeper purpose
There’s no end of right-wing accounts of these failures. Neoliberals cite the public choice theory, in which bureaucrats are self-interested rational agents who attempt to capture state spending for their own agencies, leading to bureaucratic bloat and systemic dysfunction.
Moderates attribute the failures of left-wing policy implementation to “everything, everywhere all at once government”, in which every department and policy becomes a platform for every progressive cause. Race, gender equity, climate, environment, economic inequality, disability and rainbow issues all become salient across all of government and everything grinds to a halt trying to negotiate the trade-offs.
Some economists point out that we had low inflation until Labour told the Reserve Bank to support maximum sustainable employment, and the bank decided that mainstreaming climate change issues and promoting tikanga were core functions.
There’s intense hostility on the left towards both of these arguments – but Labour needs its own theory of government failure and how it will solve it.
Politicians like to imagine they can overcome all obstacles with their own inherent magnificence, and some former Labour ministers laugh with disbelief at suggestions their government was anything short of flawless.
But there should be a deeper purpose to political parties other than indulging the ambitions of their politicians. If Labour avoids these awkward conversations about its recent history it will find itself repeating it.
