LAST THURSDAY the media wanted us to know that it's one hundred days to the general election. Of more significance though is that it will be 2191 days from when Labour was first elected on September 23 2017 and this year's general election on October 14. While the media engages in its countdown to 'the big day', hoping to spark public interest that has been conspicuously lacking so far, the past will continue to press heavily on the present.
It was in 2017 that new Labour leader Jacinda Ardern promised transformation and specifically targeted poverty and climate change as the issues she wanted her government to tackle. She was also reported as saying that capitalism had failed. While some of her eager supporters took that to mean Ardern intended to overturn the neoliberal status quo, she was misquoted and misrepresented. What Ardern actually said that the wrong policies were being applied to manage capitalism. Ardern was not offering revolution but better managerialism.
Nevertheless her supporters were still eager to believe that real change was on its way. Those of us who warned that Ardern had never demonstrated that she was anything other than a centrist politician were ignored. It was the time of Jacindamania.
At the time of her election, over one in five children lived in poverty and inequality remained a growing problem, with the wealthiest 10% owning 59% of all of the country’s assets, while the poorest half owned 2%. Housing affordability was an increasingly pressing problem while the country had the worst homelessness rate in the OCED, with almost 1% of the population living on the streets or in shelters.
Six years on, little has changed. Child poverty rates remain unchanged, while inequality has increased. House prices have increased by 58% over the past five years, with the average house now costing some eight times the average income. Meanwhile, homelessness has worsened considerably, with more than 26,000 people now waiting on the social housing list, up from 5,000 five years ago. The Green co-leader Marama Davidson, given the job by Labour to tackle homelessness, has been an abject failure.
It will be Chris Hipkin's unenviable task to try and defend Ardern's less than stellar legacy. Even though he has tried to convince a sceptical electorate that Labour has exited the 'culture wars' to concentrate on the 'bread and butter' issues, he is not only making no headway but actually losing ground.
The latest Talbot Mills opinion says that Labour has suffered a sharp drop in support from 36 percent to 31 percent. National has remained steady, rising one point to 36 percent. The gap with National is now the largest it has been since 2017. Talbot Mills, who are Labour's own pollsters, observe that 'after a long period of very close results, we may now be seeing the long expected breakout of the centre-right.'
This could well be true. The fact that the Green Party has been unable to capitalise on Labour's slump - polling at just eight percent - suggests that the electorate has lost patience with a centre left that has failed to deliver.
Labour may have once been a working class party (sort of) but today it represents corporate interests and has become a party of upper-middle-class professionals who no longer speak to the folk on the losing end of a free-market system that is becoming more unequal and unjust by the day.
But National has little reason to be satisfied with a situation where the two major parties are each struggling to hold on to little more than a third of the available electorate support. What the last three decades of neoliberal rule has taught people is that there is no possibility of significant participation in the processes of the government. Participation has been reduced to voting every three years and, even then, the system is so corrupt and so tilted in favour of the ruling class, that there is exactly zero chance that the status quo will ever be overturned. Little wonder that in 2020 some 670,000 voters stayed away from the polling booths. Something similar is likely in 2023 as well.
This needs to be rewritten to reflect Chris Hipkins's promise that there will be neither capital gains tax nor wealth tax while he is prime minister. He must go.
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