The Secret Speech

Vernon Small wrote an article a couple of days ago about Labour and their dearth of policy proposals:

First, areas where the party felt it had genuinely lost the sympathy of the voters had to be neutralised. Labour may have argued National’s adoption of so many core policies meant it had won the battle of ideas.

But self-flagellation was needed over the Electoral Finance Act and the foreshore and seabed law (where its over- reaction had spawned the Maori Party and driven it into National’s arms).

But beyond those, the party has been cautious even in signature policy areas. National’s move to allow more taxpayer- funded operations in private hospitals drew muted opposition from Labour’s Ruth Dyson. Likewise Housing Minister Phil Heatley’s potentially radical policy on state house sales.

There is also a growing fear the party is missing the boat in the economic crisis; that it is so extraordinary and the rise in joblessness and the need for skills training is so core to Labour that it should move beyond criticism to solutions.

As one Labour activist said, “we know unemployment is up and National is not doing enough . . . but it would be nice to know someone has some ideas”.

There are many reasons Labour shouldn’t be releasing policy. The first is that any ideas they come up with can be attacked on the ‘you had nine years to get this right, why didn’t you?’ basis, the second is that good ideas can simply be stolen by the government, the third is that good, wedge ideas that the government cannot adopt will be worn out by the time Labour needs to campaign on them in two years. Now is not the time to be releasing policy.

When National runs for re-election they’re not going to have a lot of options when it comes to campaign themes. They can’t run on ‘tax cuts’, they won’t be able to run on the economy which will still be in recession, they won’t be able to run another race-baiting campaign, they won’t be able to spend any money because they won’t have any and it’s real hard to run on law and order when you’re the incumbent.

If I were National I’d be running a highly negative campaign against Labour in 2011, partly based on the economy (‘we inherited a decade of deficits!’) but mostly around the ‘nanny state’ narrative that worked so well for them last year. ‘Do we really want another Labour government telling us what we can eat and how we should raise our kids and what time we should go to bed?’ That sort of thing.

This will probably work – people were really, genuinely sick of Labour’s smug, patronising we-know-best-approach by the end of their last term – but it’s also very easy to innoculate against.

First of all, when Labour formulate policy they’re going to have to ask themselves how it could be used against them. It still blows my mind that in the middle of the last election campaign Labour released an amendment to the building code that regulated (amongst other things) pressure and water cylinder size for indoor showers. National could hardly believe their luck and spent weeks crowing about how another term of Labour would mean cold showers for everyone.

Just as National swallowed dead rats regarding asset sales and the nuclear free policy Labour will have to suck it up and abandon their various goals around social engineering if they want to win another election in the next ten years.

Second, Goff needs to give a speech repudiating his party’s nanny state legacy: the ideal moment would be his party conference in September. Lines like: ‘the Labour Party wants to help Kiwi’s get on with their lives not tell them how to live them’ (except, you know, not as crappy) and ‘I’m proud of what we achieved during government but it is clear that at the end we lost our way’ and so on. I think the Labour Party itself needs to hear this, even more so than the public – many of them still think that the election was somehow stolen by Crosby/Textor, that their party still has the Mandate of Heaven and that the public will eventually realise they’ve been hoodwinked and tearfully return Labour to their rightful position of power, and also all the polls are wrong because they don’t include cell-phones. They need their new leader to give them a reality check.

Goff can’t directly attack his predecessor but he can reject the uglier aspects of Clarkism – the arrogance, the smugness, the triumph of politics and spin over common sense and effective policy.

Although Goff would take pains to say that he wasn’t criticising Clark (‘highest respect etc’) the media would correctly see it as such; Goff and his speech would receive extensive coverage and all those profiles and interviews that eluded him when he became leader back in November.

Kruschev famously pulled a similar stunt after the death of Stalin – there was uncertainty over who was really running the country; Kruschev renounced Stalinism on the premise that only the true successor to Stalin would dare speak ill of Uncle Joe.

There is an apocryphal story that in the midst of his speech decrying the famines and the purges someone called out to Kruschev ‘and where were you?’ Kruschev stopped and glowered out at the audience. ‘Who said that?’

There was a deathly silence and Kruschev said: ‘That is where I was.’