WHEN THE TIMES DEMAND REAL CHANGE, LABOUR IS PROPOSING MORE OF THE SAME

Perhaps the biggest obstacle in the way of Chris Hipkins and the Labour Party winning next year's general election is Chris Hipkins and the Labour Party. So why should the Green Party support it? 

 

ONE OF New Zealand’s largest pipe maintenance and drainage companies went into administration today, with some 100 staff losing their jobs. Peter Knight, the Director of Auckland-based Pipe Vision, told the media: 'We just haven’t been able to continue, it’s been tough — everything feels like it’s in a deep recession.'

He's not wrong. While the Government's friends in the media continue their farcical efforts to attenuate the positive and minimise the negative, there can be no disguising the fact that the New Zealand economy is deep in the mire. And the Government's only 'solution' is failed trickled down economics. Economist JK Galbraith described this as 'horse and sparrow theory'; if you feed the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for the sparrows. That's us, and about 150,000 of us are lining up at the foodbanks every week. Trickle-down economics is a fraud that only enriches the already wealthy while increasing the levels of poverty and inequality.

Given the economic mess the country is in and the increasing levels of anger and frustration in the community, it could be reasonably of expected that support for the Government would be on a terminal decline. It isn't. The latest Taxpayer Union-Curia poll, released this week, has National on 33.9 percent and Labour on 31.1 percent. Indeed, all the polling over the last year or so shows that neither Labour nor National have been able to carve out a decisive advantage. They will be both relying on the support of minor parties to form a government.

It shouldn't be this way, and Labour only has itself to blame that it is this way. The country's economic model is irredeemably broken, but Labour has yet to spell out what its alternative is. In fact, does it have an alternative? People are looking for a coherent economic alternative, but Chris Hipkins and Labour have declined to provide it. It has abandoned, in conjunction with the union hierarchy, any attempt to build grassroots opposition to the Government and put all its eggs in the election basket. Again.

Chris Hipkins says that Labour will begin rolling out policy closer to the election, but all signs already suggest that Labour has no intention of abandoning the centrism that lost it the last election. Hipkins dismissal of the Green Party's alternative budget as 'a huge spend up' and 'unrealistic' does not suggest that Labour or the Green's are on the same page as far as economic policy is concerned.

What Hipkins seems unable to grasp is that it is conservative economics that have brought New Zealand to the position it is today. The Green Party recognises that and is proposing an economic agenda based on public investment, public ownership and social, economic and environmental justice. Hipkins thinks this is not sensible.

Some pundits are already arguing that the Green Party needs to swallow the dead rat and commit itself to an electoral deal with Labour. If it does do that, then the Green's can rightfully be criticised for providing progressive cover for a Labour Party that continues to defend the status quo. 

It's not up to the Green Party to compromise away its policies, as it did under the James Shaw-led Green Party. It is up to the Labour Party to front up and acknowledge that neoliberalism has failed and that centrist politics is a dead end.