The contest for the leadership of the Labour party heralds a new era of democracy for the Labour party, and for New Zealand, and people are quite rightly excited about it.
As I’ve said before, this is a great opportunity to bring unity to the party and to get a head-start on the election campaign.
That said, the right see this as a chance to try to further a narrative of division. Not that they’re doing a very good job of it as they aren’t particularly experienced in democracy, have no experience in this kind of organising opportunity, and thus don’t know how to counter it.
Which is why we’ve seen all sorts of desperate trolling from John Key all the way down to the usual inane suspects. The fact that they are keep changing tack suggests to me that they’re not getting any traction and they probably aren’t getting much joy out of their market research either. It’s very hard to test or focus group to such a specific situation (what are they going to do? Get together a focus group made up of a cross-section of Labour members, test anti-Labour messages and then hope everyone keeps their mouth shut?).
My guess is this means they’re probably scouring teh webz trying to get a sense of where they can put a wedge in. It’s up to you, readers and bloggers, to give them no such chance.
In other words. Don’t. Feed. The. Trolls. This process is about Labour talking to Labour, and simultaneously showing voters just how strong and democratic Labour really is. Whatever the usual right-wing suspects say is irrelevant.
As an aside, any Labour people who think it’s clever to dabble in a bit of under the radar backstabbing should be aware that there is no “under the radar”, and if you damage the democratic process you’ll be assisting the right and it’ll be known. Not that I expect any such thing to happen of course.
And that concludes my gentle word of advice. Now let’s get back to it – what a great time to be in the Labour family!
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