Posts by Lew Stoddart
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to BenWilson,
In full agreement with your assessment of Labour under Clark, and the way forward, Ben. Also it's completely true that the left doesn't have a monopoly on evidence; there's plenty of delusion on our side of the fence as well. The notion that revolutionary socialism can be democratic is probably foremost among the left's illusions.
But that narrative worked pretty well in its day, and in spite of a century's evidence to the contrary, people still believe that shit.
L
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to Jan Farr,
Yes that’s true – but negativity is always a winner – and our message is not negative.
Due respect, but it's bullshit to say that positivity can't be a winner.
Change you can believe in
The audacity of hope
Yes We Can
Choose a brighter futureThat's jut winning narratives from 2008.
Other than that, we have:
The man from Hope (Clinton)
Morning again in America
Never had it so good
I agree with Nick (arguable, but he is Deputy PM)
and most obviously, A New Deal.I could go on, but I think you get the point.
L
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to BenWilson,
If wholesale privatisation is not stopped, it won't matter that they're unpopular. The Nats will leave office in 2014 with heads held high.
L
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to BenWilson,
[Orewa] could be called “National’s Famous Bluff”. Considering that they just last week undid every consequence of it, and are now in bed with the elected representatives of the very sentiment that Brash attacked.
I’d love to read this argued a bit more formally; it looks obviously true on its face, and I think there’s a lot to be understood about the last decade or so of NZ politics in it.
This discussion has brought to mind a paper by Jon Johansson, Orewa and the Rhetoric of Illusion, in which he basically argues that the Orewa speech wasn’t grounded in actual objective reality – that it was a cynical political ploy, and that fact, more than the specific details of its race-baiting rhetoric, is what really made it deleterious to NZ political discourse.
So much of the NZ and international right’s narrative discourse is thus. The whole ‘Nanny State’ line of argument by a party which, now in government, has since seen fit to impose all sorts of paternalism; the attacks against s59 by the party whose leader’s ‘statesmanlike gesture’ got the repeal passed; the economic argument Sacha cites, the Domino Effect, WMD in Iraq, and dozens of other examples – so much of it is simply demonstrably false. And yet the narratives work anyhow. In many cases, they come to replace actual observed reality for their adherents, even when contradictory events are bringing down peoples’ worlds around them.
So given my belief in policy and government which is based in reality rather than illusion, my frustration is that the left can’t – or more often, won’t – build narratives like that, but which are supported rather than contradicted by the real world. Imagine the potential!
L
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to giovanni tiso,
The point of saying that it’s the opposition’s job to position themselves to win elections – a plain statement of fact –isn’t to elide the difference between Orewa and every other political event; it’s to say that regardless of the difference, they should be trying to do so anyhow. Of course I don’t expect them to pull out an Orewa every year, or even every term. It was an epochal moment in Aotearoan politics, and one which still informs the discourse after seven years and two elections. But the opposition haven’t done anything even remotely approaching Orewa; they haven’t done anything which has reached into the nation’s soul and given it a tweak; or even looked as if they might.
It’s not an easy proposition, but the job is to find ways to do it anyhow. If they try, and fail – fair enough. My main objection is that I don’t see them busting arse to try and make it happen. I don’t see any of the necessary groundwork being laid with clear, consistent, repeated, resonant positioning statements, I don’t see the followthrough when they do make the headlines for the right reasons.
They did seem to be building up a head of steam in February last year, and I wrote about the wealth of raw material they could use to craft a narrative of the government as essentially rapacious crony capitalists. Shouldn’t have been too hard an ask, since that’s how the majority of New Zealand saw National until about mid-2004. But to work as a narrative for this coming election, that groundwork needed to be laid down good and early, and it wasn’t. If it had been, tying this February’s privatisation agenda into it would have been a great deal easier. This is how Brash and his advisors did – the Orewa speech came before the Ngāti Apa decision which kicked off the Foreshore and Seabed thing, and the two dovetailed.
And that’s not even getting into the 2008 election. I’ve gone on long enough.
L
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to Che Tibby,
This is probably apostasy, but I’d consider dunne. Only because chauvel is about as far from my electorate as you get on the representation scale.
Heh, and the usual objection he’s a homo coconut in a suburb of desperate Khandallah housewives.
I’d vote for Charles if he were my local. Representation is good and all, but he’s really really competent, and that’s a rare and precious quality.
L
* Never stated with quite such a fine point as this, of course :)
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to Jan Farr,
Ok. How about Orewa? Far from an election as you can get. Gave them a massive polling bounce.
The point isn't that it's easy to own the media agenda from opposition -- it's not. But it is possible. It can be done. Parties just have to find a way to do it. It's their job, after all.
L
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to Paul Williams,
It’s just Ōhariu now – but little change to the boundaries or demo. They’re mostly thinking “how am I going to afford fuel for my BMW X5 now that the government is cutting childcare subsidies and public service jobs”, I expect.
But more seriously, it’s a battleground seat. Dunne’s profile has been slipping, and he faces determined opposition from the Nats, Labour and Greens – Shanks, Chauvel and Gareth Hughes, the former two of which were both within a couple thousand votes of him in 2008. Dunne hasn’t covered himself in glory this term; all that reflected from his portfolio (revenue) has been hogged by English, and to be honest there’s not been much glory in a term where the tax cuts have come to a tiny fraction of what was promised. And he hasn’t gotten his income-splitting social-engineering measure passed (and I can’t see it happening in the present circumstances).
Barring exigencies, I think he’ll hold it – but it’s a margin call.
As for the rest of the party – there isn’t one.
L
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to Paul Williams,
Lew and I possibly disagree on the issue of “policy”, but whatever Labour does differently has to be sensibly determined and not just selected to generate column inches in the short term.
No, Paul, I think you and I agree about this. Policy is what underpins all the razzle-dazzle of campaigning, and as far as possible, it needs to be set on the basis of sound evidence, principle and ideological vision. Good policy is good policy. Those setting the policy track do need to take cognisance of the state of the electorate and the campaign field, but this doesn’t automatically extend to shelving or dropping good policy for the sake of soundbites. That’s political cowardice, and I’m by no means advocating it.
(Easy to get the balance wrong, though. The s59 repeal, while good policy, was an overreach which was deleterious to Labour (despite not being Labour policy). I think the political loss incurred by sticking to the strict repeal was probably a poor tradeoff, when the Clark government could have adopted the Borrows amendment as a ‘near enough’ solution which lessened their vulnerability to the ‘nanny state’ line of rhetoric. Easy to say so with hindsight, too: at the time, I was right in behind the full repeal as passed.)
L
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to Lew Stoddart,
Re my comments about Labour strategic comms -- harsh, but context is important. The people doing that job can only work with what they've got to work with. The leadership sets strategic direction, and in my view that's a significant limiting factor. On the quality of the leadership itself, my views are well known. Without pretending any specific knowledge, I'm certain they operate under extreme constraints -- in terms of resourcing, information and communication and freedom of initiative. So it's not entirely their fault.
None of that, of course, changes the fact that the results are poor, but it does explain why to an extent.
L