Photo: Scoop
Due to the failure of my home internet connection and my ISP’s general incompetence there has been some delay in posting this 
In the NZ general election over the weekend the Labour Party suffered a huge defeat (down from 41% of the vote in 2005 to 33% this time) and is now relegated to the opposition benches. In part this was due to the National Party staking out more moderate centre ground and even outflanking Labour to the left on some issues (eg promising state assistance for all laid off workers and directing the government superannuation fund to invest in local rather than overseas assets). A bigger factor though was probably the decline in voter turnout (from 80.92% of enrolled voters last election to 78.69% this time) – with the trend especially marked in the so-called “Labour heartland” of South Auckland and also in the Maori seats – and Labour’s failure to arrest the widening gap between rich and poor during its nine years in power.
As expected, the extraparliamentary left parties (the Alliance, Workers Party and RAM) all got tiny votes – although RAM were talking up their chances big time going into the election yet only got around 400 votes, despite avoiding all references to scary terms like “socialism” or “the working class”!
The Alliance slightly increased their vote from 2005, gaining just over 1 700 votes.
The 824 votes for WP was a modest total but does at least represent a solid core of people who were prepared to defy the enormous pressure not to cast a “wasted vote” and opt for a hard left anticapitalist alternative. Also given that WP only achieved offical registration at the beginning of October and so had only 5 weeks to campaign for the party vote (and also got very little media exposure) I am confident that next time round we will be able to build on this (especially if we stand more candidates).
It was certainly notable that in areas like Christchurch East where we have been doing a lot of campaigning our party vote was a lot stronger (12 votes from one booth in the working class suburb Aranui alone, 40 across the electorate).
More important than the amount of votes gathered however was the big boost in the party’s profile among workers and a modest influx of new activists into the organisation. Hopefully we can continue to build on this success in the coming weeks and months.
Full preliminary election results available here.
November 14, 2008 at 4:55 pm
Congratulations on your result Tim, and good work on getting the votes there in Christchurch. Your commentary is a pleasant change from the seethingly triumphalist comments about RAM’s electoral performance that have come from some of your comrades in your party!
Agreed too on your comments about low turnout (which is invariably bad for left-wing parties) and National outflanking Labour on the left on some issues.
Cheers,
Oliver
November 15, 2008 at 1:13 am
how much are the 12 & 40 votes in Christchurch East in %?
November 15, 2008 at 1:42 am
Cheers Oliver.
I’m know you folks in RAM also put a lot of energy into your campaign despite the disappointing result. As I said in the post above, I think that fundamentally the vote tallies Alliance, WP and RAM all reflect the extremely low levels of political consciousness and radicalisation in NZ at the moment, and are not the result of any lack of élan or effort on the part of us activists.
It’s true that there was perhaps a certain element of schadenfreude for WP comrades in seeing the RAM result. However, this is not because we entertain any illusions that our support base is qualitatively superior to RAM’s (it isn’t) but rather because our comrades saw it as a vindication of what we have been saying all along, i.e. that it is dangerous and delusional for the left (whether it be the radical reformist left or the revolutionary anticapitalist left) to think that it can command a mass following (or clain to represent a “political tsunami”, as one RAM press statement put it) in NZ in the current period.
The result of 9 years under Labour has actually been a *decrease* in politicisation among workers and a demobilisation of the class in general (already atomised after the economic shock treatment of the 80s and early 90s), which is reflected in the high level of voter abstention and the steady downward trend in the official strike statistics.
I think that basically means that no matter whether you hold to a revolutionary marxist perspective (as WP does) or a left nationalist/social democratic one (like yourself), you still are confronted with a yawning gap between the political message you are trying to get across and the actual level of consciousness of most people. This is why I think that for groups such as WP the priority must be working towards regroupment with other marxists and winning individual workers on the basis of slow and patient propaganda work, not exaggerated or overblown perspectives and rhetoric.
I recognise that the project you and other RAM members are engaged in is very different to our own, however I think the way forward is basically the same i.e. (in the words of Trotsky) “to patiently explain” to the masses and to participate in class struggles wherever they develop but not to try to substitute your small band of activists for the absence of a truly mass movement.
Otherwise you run the risk of becoming like your erstwhile collaborators Socialist Worker, who despite having some highly intelligent and capable leaders have burned out and exhausted scores of cadre over the years through so many attempts to take a shortcut to the political big time. I take absolutely no sectarian delight in this, as these activists/cadre who become demoralised with the failure of the promised mass breakthroughs to materialise will almost certainly lost to the left for good. And our ranks are already thin enough!
November 15, 2008 at 1:48 am
“how much are the 12 & 40 votes in Christchurch East in %?”
Still bugger all in percentage terms – 2.17% at St James School in Aranui was our best booth and we got 0.12% across the whole of the Christchurch East electorate. But it was a lot better than our national average!
December 30, 2008 at 12:02 pm
If you really examine the election result it wasn’t a huge loss for the Labour Party because it has been a minority coalition government backed up by minority parties for nine years.
The real loser was NZ First, it has been annihilated; will it ever return?
Labour has lost one of its greatest political leaders and NZ one of its greatest prime ministers who only come along every couple of generations or so – but Helen was special. She was a humanitararian like Savage and Kirk, and a political operator like Fraser! She helped my family personally. Just a pity she had some political clowns in her administration.
As for Key? He will go as far as the National Party will let him. When he no longer tows the party line he will get shafted in favour of Bill English.