Why Labour can win
3 October 2009 | by Hon. Richard Prebble CBE
Prime Minister Phil Goff - it could happen
MMP favours the left. If we had had MMP for the last forty years National would have only been certain of governing after just four elections and that includes the 1996 election when Winston betrayed his voters’ expectations.
Phil Goff has to be the favourite
Under MMP though it’s the list vote that matters and the two-party swing required there is a more difficult 5.84%. Anderton cites the 1981 election where with him as party president Labour won more votes than National.
There is a better example though, the election of 1978. I was a Labour MP at the time. Robert Muldoon whipped Bill Rowling in every debate and the incumbent National government were defending a huge majority in Parliament. Opinion polls gave them an unassailable lead and even even we Labour MPs expected to be beaten. We had no coherent policy, no money, and just seemed hopelessly outclassed.
So no-one was more surprised than Labour itself when the party won a greater number of individual votes in the 1978 election, though still losing on numbers of electorates won. Under MMP Labour would have been in government, and this is despite being totally unprepared.
Three years later, while being further handicapped by a divisive party president, and again being out-spent and out-organised, Labour won more votes than National in the 1981 election as well.
This second consecutive loss by the party with a greater popular mandate provided the real impetus for electoral reform, heralding the demise of the first-past-the-post system.
Back in the present, Phil Goff is a much more impressive figure than Bill Rowling was. He is smarter for a start, and is a much more experienced politician going into an election, having 15 years prior experience as a successful minister, compared to Rowling’s three years and John Key’s single year. Goff has fought far more elections than either man. Experience counts.
Take the Mt Albert by-election which is the only head to head comparison we have of Phil Goff versus John Key. Labour’s polling two months out only gave Labour only a very slight lead.
Goff and Key then took the major decisions that turned a possible National win into a Labour landslide. First, both leaders selected their candidates. Phil Goff picked David Shearer who did not put a foot wrong. John Key picked Melissa Lee who was the wrong candidate even before she opened her month and proved it. Very few Koreans live in Mount Albert.
Both men also had a big say in who organised their campaigns. Goff relied on Labour’s hardened professionals who ran a textbook campaign. In contrast John Key made the bizarre choice of a cabinet minister, Jonathon Coleman, as National’s campaign manager.
Some claim by-elections are a more reliable guide than polling. That by-election showed how soft National’s support is and how in a general election a 5.85% two-party swing is enitrely possible. It also raises serious reservations about John Key’s leadership in an election campaign.
If John Key was more experienced, National would not have contested the Mt Albert by-election. National under Muldoon did not contest Sydenham when Norman Kirk died, thus depriving Labour of a contested victory.
Key could have said that the government backed Helen Clark’s nomination for the UNDP and therefore National will not contest the by-election. This would have deprived Phil Goff of the subsequent victory which helped legitimise his leadership and solidify his internal party support.
John Key has further challenges. No third party under MMP has survived going into coalition with the governing party. New Zealand First, the Alliance and United were reduced to single seat independents claiming to be a party. National’s coalition partners ACT and the Maori party are in what Rodney Hide calls the “killing zone”. ACT’s solution is to have ministers outside of the cabinet. ACT’s agreement with the government is also very clever, mandating commissions on ACT’s favourite subjects like reducing red tape.
Presumably this generates positive publicity for the party, but I wonder if it actually registers with the voters. ACT consistently polls below the statistical margin of error.
The Maori Party is not in true coalition either. Its representatives in Parliament are all electorate MPs. The party itself focuses only on Maori issues. In the heat of an election campaign when virtually all the Maori party’s voters want a Labour government will the Maori Party avoid the fate of previous government coalition allies?
Even if National beats Labour, John Key may not have the allies to form a government. John Key’s decision to ignore the 87% vote in the smacking referendum may cost National dearly.
The issue will not go away. ACT’s John Boscawen having drawn the “Legalise a smack” private member’s bill can introduce the bill at any convenient time, such as a month before the next election.
If that issue results in a boost in votes for the Christian parties but each of which still falls short of the five percent threshold, then that will mainly be votes lost from the centre right.
National’s biggest handicap though, is that while they defeated Labour in the last election, they failed to build the foundation for a long-term transfer of power.
During their time in government Labour massively increased government spending for little perceptible return, yet National has failed to make the case that Labour is fiscally reckless.
After appointing Michael Cullen to a string of boards it then becomes hard to argue he was a disastrous financial manager. Similarly, supporting Helen Clark for work at the UN lends credibility to Labour. Credibility, the feeling that a party can be trusted to be in charge of the country, is political gold, and is what elections are won with.
Subsequently, Labour won twelve new seats. No party that had just lost government has ever gained a dozen new MPs. They mostly come from Helen Clark’s office where are they trained to be professional career politicians who will do what it takes to win. Their youth and enthusiasm is revitalising the party.
Phil Goff has problems of his own
Goff is no antipodean Obama either, few indeed would cross the road to hear him speak. Meanwhile the party scatches out a subsistence living on state funding diverted from parliament. Labour just does not have the membership, policy or money to fight an effective election campaign
Today’s working class who Labour must motivate to vote is brown, yet Goff has never been able to relate to Labour’s Maori, Pacific and Asian vote. The white tribe of Outrageous Fortune who Phil instinctively reaches out to is just not a big enough voting group, and they prefer John Key in any case.
John Key’s strength is also his weakness, his instincts as a trader. He has traded Cullen and Clark out of parliament for his short term gain and Labour’s long term advantage. These same trading instincts have led John Key to bet that the global recession will be quick. He has been more optimistic in this than either Goff or English and it is the kind of bet which shows why he was one of Merrill Lynch’s top foreign exchange traders.
If Key is wrong and we suffer further economic decline it will cost him his job. If he’s right and we are coming out of this recession quickly then despite history being against National it would be John Key’s election to lose.