Dr Michael Bassett: Labour's struggle to re-position itself

There is something pathetic about the Labour Party’s efforts to re-position itself after its worst defeat in modern history. From being the only party since the introduction of MMP to win an outright majority in Parliament it slumped last year to a total vote of not much more than 25% overall. Labour’s Auckland results were catastrophic. The party lost the electorate of New Lynn which had been solidly Labour since a by-election in 1926, and Roskill that had been in Labour’s hands for nearly all the time since 1931. Labour came within an ace of losing Mt Albert which Jacinda Ardern had retained in 2020 with a 20,000 majority. Its lack lustre new MP seemed bewildered by her near encounter with the political guillotine.

After a catastrophe like that, sensible people would expect that the party would engage in a serious policy and strategy re-think. If that is happening, then it is being carefully hidden from public view. Instead, with hapless Chris Hipkins at the helm, it looks pretty much as if Labour intends to replay its match-losing game, with nothing new to offer voters at the next election than a Capital Gains Tax. The party’s key spokespeople are mostly “seen you befores,” and there is no visible sign that the party has learnt anything from the 2023 election.

Labour’s main hang-up is its relationship with Maori agitators. Having suddenly put Maori advantage on speed after 2020, Hipkins has no idea what to do now. Complicating matters is the fact that there is now more than one pro-Maori voice to his left. The Greens who have had a bad year with so many awful headlines over Kerekere, Golriz Ghahraman, Darleen Tana, are themselves identifying strongly with separatist cries from their left in the Maori Party which jabbers Maori uber alles at every opportunity.

At the same time as old lags like Willie Jackson and Peeni Henare keep pushing Labour’s extreme Maori cause into what is now a very crowded field, a rapidly growing portion of the population that has come to New Zealand largely as a result of Labour’s immigration policies is spectacularly ignored by the party. Such has been the demographic change to many parts of Auckland, in particular, that several suburbs are unrecognisable compared with just 25 years ago. I lunched recently in New Lynn, and of more than 100 people who passed the window, only six were Pakeha or Maori. The rest were people of Chinese, Indian, African and Middle Eastern origin, with at least ten women wearing Muslim head scarves. For the most part they are recent arrivals; they are struggling to gain acceptance in their new country. Special health housing and educational advancement for Maori is not much use to these new citizens.

All this suggests that the Labour Party, one year after the last election, still hasn’t worked out why it lost in 2023. As new citizens watched Jacinda and Chippy pander to Maori with their health and educational policies, they saw a government that was slow to respond to the mostly Maori ram-raiders of Indian dairies and superettes. Not surprisingly, the newcomers decided to vote for National, Act and New Zealand First. Their law and order policies were more in line with the stories they’d heard about New Zealand being a safe country for families.

What Labour doesn’t realise is that first political impressions formed by newcomers usually stick. Chinese from Hong Kong and the mainland, many of whom came to New Zealand after passage of the Immigration Act 1986 have mostly given up on Labour because it so obviously is in the thrall of radical Maori. New Indian migrants and other ethnicities joined them in 2023. They show few signs of returning to Labour a year later. Why should they? Those who have found out anything about the Treaty of Waitangi know that Maori ceded sovereignty to the Queen in 1840. Hello? Chris Hipkins tells them they didn’t. What’s up? Does he believe Maori should rule us all? Moreover, clause 3 of the Treaty promises everyone equal rights and duties. But Labour still favours special health and educational privileges for Maori, just as they did in power between 2017 and 2023. Labour keeps saying to new immigrants that they are less important than Maori, and that that party operates with different levels of respect and favouritism.

When will the Labour Party with its once proud history of supporting multi-cultural immigration, equal rights for all ethnicities, wake up to modern realities? There are about 150 different ethnicities in today’s New Zealand, all with rights equal to those enjoyed by Maori and Pakeha. Until Labour comes to grips with the new demographic realities that they brought about themselves they don’t deserve to be back in office, and probably won’t be.

Historian Dr Michael Bassett, a Minister in the Fourth Labour Government. This article was first published HERE