ELECTION RESULT: NEOLIBERALISM WINS AGAIN

As Labour heads for a certain election defeat, the liberal left has little to offer but its unfounded and irrational belief that Labour can still be a vehicle for progressive policies.

THE COUNTRY is heading into an election campaign which will result in another predictable victory for the free market and neoliberalism. Despite the huffin' and puffin' from the political parties and the accompanying excitable commentary from the mainstream media, the status quo will remain unchallenged. For a brief moment in time another Labour leader, Jacinda Ardern, hinted that any government led by her would be 'transformational' but, once installed in office, she thought better of it. Now, in 2023, Chris Hipkins has little to offer but GST-free fruit and vegetables. Meanwhile, the National Party thinks that tax cuts for the middle class will be our economic salvation.

We've seen and heard it all before of course, the lack of vision and imagination, but it all seems rather grimmer this time round. Even the commentaries from some of Labour's more uncritical supporters seems desperate and forced. Perhaps this is because they know, deep down, Labour will be defeated on October 14. But maybe they have been forced to look out of the window of the cosy Labour clubhouse where they have resided for the past six years. For the first time, they have finally woken up to the fact that, for many people, these are indeed desperate times. This is not just the workings of an 'alt right' conspiracy.

In the immediacy of the post-pandemic era, the Labour Government declared that it would 'build back better' but, instead, the country's levels of inequality and poverty have only increased, the housing crisis has become an entrenched social malignancy and the food banks have never been busier.

And our politicians continue to underestimate, perhaps deliberately, the existential threat that is posed by climate change. As I write this, I'm looking at new wildfires in Canada and where the citizens of the town of Yellowknife (pop:20,000) are being told to evacuate as the fires advance. This comes at a time when wildfires have devastated parts of the Hawaiian island of Maui. 

Yet, despite the regularity of extreme weather events in New Zealand, driven by climate change, our politicians think that it is enough to tinker with the levers and dials of the very economic machine that is pulling us all over the cliff. At the very time that the Green Party should be calling for a transformational Green New Deal it merely wants to adjust the neoliberal settings via a wealth tax. 

It is worth noting that many political revolutions, like those that occurred in Europe in 1848, were not the product of crisis but of a continuing and deepening economic stagnation. It was in the midst of this economic stagnation that Karl Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto, declaring that workers had nothing to lose but their chains.

It has been evident for some time that only a radical break with the past will rescue the working class from the post-pandemic malaise and the growing climate crisis. But when we are in desperate need of a new left radicalism, the New Zealand left, such as it is, continues to look to the Labour Party for salvation. 

Some forty years of a slavish devotion to neoliberalism has gutted the Labour Party of even the mildest of its social democratic aspirations. Yet the liberal left continues to delude themselves into believing that it can still be a vehicle for progressive policies. This is looking like nothing more than a desire to tinker with the status quo rather than decisively break with it. But the liberal left may well find that the country's steady economic and political decline will encourage ever more people to look beyond the status quo that it continues to protect.