Though Vernon Small passes for the Dominion Post’s political pundit, there are only wisps of truth in his pontifications.
His article yesterday pressing the old media flesh for Grant Robertson’s candidacy for the NZ Labour Party Leadership is a case in point.
His article yesterday pressing the old media flesh for Grant Robertson’s candidacy for the NZ Labour Party Leadership is a case in point.
[See: ‘Who will take the fight to National?’ at: http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/comment/columnists/vernon-small/9082310/Who-will-take-the-fight-to-National].
Small is trapped in a simplistic Left-Right
dialectic that portrays David Cunliffe’s as emanating from the ‘salon of the
old guard and more conservative members on the Right’, presumably in contrast to Grant
Robertson who by implication commands the young and more progressive on the
Left.
But, as Michael Cullen tellingly
recounted in a talk that he gave a couple of months or more ago at the Cossie
Club in Upper Hutt - about NZ Labour’s ongoing problem with mobilizing support and
reaping votes - the battleground is perhaps better seen in terms of a stand-off
between Left ‘idealism’ and Social ‘freedom’.
[Incidentally, Cullen also made the converse point that parties on the Right often have an uneasy ride on a Blue Libertarian - Conservative [Blimpish Bigot] tandem, where the terms embody very different notions of freedom and idealism].
[Incidentally, Cullen also made the converse point that parties on the Right often have an uneasy ride on a Blue Libertarian - Conservative [Blimpish Bigot] tandem, where the terms embody very different notions of freedom and idealism].
The Red Idealists of the Labour
movement are highly committed to defending the Welfare State, widening
economic opportunities, reducing income disparities and protecting the
vulnerable [especially children]. They are more often than not somewhat
‘conservative’ in their social values and their wider voter support comes from
traditional Blue Collar / Working Class families.
In Wellington, the NZ Labour people
in this category are predominantly older – so here it also becomes a matter of
youth versus yesterday [hence Grant Robertson's campaign slogan 'New Generation'].
The Social Rainbow members of the
Labour Party are more highly committed to an Open Society, widening personal
freedoms [including for example same-sex marriage], promoting diversity and
protecting the environment [in tandem with the Green Party]. They appear to the
Idealists to be very casual about their wider political values and unreliable
on matters of integrity and consistency, with their core voter support
springing from inner city, trendy, cool, foot-loose dinkies and metrosexuals.
Robertson's close coterie provides examples of people who will not only look you in the eye as a fellow Labour Party worker and lie to you - but come to dinner, eat your food, shake your hand, look you in the eye and then lie to you.
Most of these people have little experience of life or work outside student affairs and party activism. Like Robertson himself they crowd their blank back-stories with fables. To establish his 'labour' credentials Grant falls back on the time he once spent working in a supermarket in the university vacation - and he bloats his CV so that he can term himself a former 'Diplomat' in the wake of a patronage-gained internship in New York with the UN.
As far as I am aware, the only newspaper article that Robertson has published on a specific policy issue was on student allowances.
Robertson's close coterie provides examples of people who will not only look you in the eye as a fellow Labour Party worker and lie to you - but come to dinner, eat your food, shake your hand, look you in the eye and then lie to you.
Most of these people have little experience of life or work outside student affairs and party activism. Like Robertson himself they crowd their blank back-stories with fables. To establish his 'labour' credentials Grant falls back on the time he once spent working in a supermarket in the university vacation - and he bloats his CV so that he can term himself a former 'Diplomat' in the wake of a patronage-gained internship in New York with the UN.
As far as I am aware, the only newspaper article that Robertson has published on a specific policy issue was on student allowances.
Indeed Vernon Small rightly observes that
Robertson is seen ‘as very "Wellington"; more the political operator
than the populist leader, despite the inspiration he drew as an aspiring
politician from another round guy with glasses - David Lange’.
But Small is very wrong to go on to
argue that Robertson ‘is party-Labour through and through’.
My own take on Robertson – to
whom I have to admit I have taken a deep personal dislike from observing his
skulduggery on the local political scene – is that he is God’s Gift to the
National Party.
For what it is worth, I think
that National could easily wrest Central Wellington off Robbie if it ran one of
its high profile media darling celebutantes or toady ex-All Blacks against
him. It chooses not to do that because he fits the bill perfectly in selling
the idea to floating voters elsewhere in New Zealand that, at the top, NZ Labour
consists of a bunch of Capital up-themselves and out-for-themselves dandies, dudes and ponces.
Wouldn't National just love him as Leader [together with ensuing twee and cool photo opportunities of him with his 'lovely husband' Alf on Cuba Street and up the Golden Mile]?
Wouldn't National just love him as Leader [together with ensuing twee and cool photo opportunities of him with his 'lovely husband' Alf on Cuba Street and up the Golden Mile]?
So, as a very committed Idealist who really wants NZ Labour to win the next election, I very much hope that David Cunliffe gets the job.
I don’t envy him though in trying
to ‘unify’ the Party!
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