From Election 2023’s result through to February 2024 there has been massive loss and damage to the Parliamentary capacity of Labour and Greens.
Who still has the capacity to lead? What’s left?
Let’s start with the Green Party.
James Shaw is a loss, since he achieved that rare thing of forming an enduring cross-Party market mechanism for evaluating and trading carbon pricing. Few in the banking or brokering or top 4 accountancy consultancies ever had a cross word to say of him.
In partial replacement, MP Scott Willis has some useful capacity in small scale green energy production consulting, but is unlikely to engage successfully with environmental regulation and the officials who draft this tough area.
Huhana Lyndon is not short of business experience, nor is Darleen Tana. The field is theirs for the Greens to engage with business the way Shaw did.
The political gain from the loss of James Shaw is the rise to leadership of Chloe Swarbrick.
She’s certainly got tougher over time, and will provide a stronger sense of attack than Shaw did to issues.
There is no list replacement for what Efeso Collins brought in the next 5 of the Green Party list, may he rest in peace. He generated a credible alternative to Labour in the massive voting area of South Auckland. Some Pasifika capacity remains in Teanau Tuiono as he spans both Cook Island and Maori peoples. There’s some of Efeso’s local government knowledge in the form of Celia Wade-Brown, Tamatha Paul, and Lan Pham.
The loss of Golriz Gharaman weakens the Green Party capacity to challenge dominant discourses in international relations, foreign affairs and immigration, particularly from a social justice point of view. Again, no current replacement.
The net effect of a strong Maori caucus in the Greens is a latent ability to build strong and deep horizontal leadership with Te Pati Maori and with Labour’s Maori caucus (such as it is now). That has some potential to continue the oppositional energy started in January 2024 with Kingitanga and at Waitangi, if there is a will to reach and cooperate across parties. Go for it, if you can outplay Winston and Shane.
Now to the Labour Party.
Nanaia Mahuta gave her all to her people and to water reform, and she got all her reforms through. Her electoral loss and the reversal of her reforms leaves the field open for National. There is no one in Labour with the degree of expertise in water governance that she possesses. Other than Mr Parker, which we’ll get to shortly.
Michael Wood, supposedly one of Ardern’s safest pairs of hands, sank in his own political quagmire. It will not be possible for a lifetime Palmy leader like Tangi Utikere to pick up the scale and political exposure of the transport portfolio and to make dents into Minister Brown with it.
The loss of Andrew Little isn’t quite so bad in the health front, due to the strength Labour has in Dr Ayesha Verrall. She will have a great time defending the re-centralisation of the health sector Labour led. While Dr Verrall might have been ably assisted if Dr Liz Craig had hung on, Dr Verrall knows the bureaucracy better than anyone else in parliament and she will easily match the Minister of Health on the floor and in the media.
Kelvin Davis is not a loss to be noticed outside of the Far North. Kaitaia never had the political heft it did with Kelvin, and likely never will again. But there are still a good few Maori members in caucus to assist in building a fresh and credible position with the many Maori communities and interests. Labour now rely totally on Willie Jackson to be able to reach out to Maori MPs in parliament. Labour will remain at a low ebb while they fail to make inroads into the NZFirst Maori vote or the Maori seats they used to bank on.
It is also stark mismatch that Dr Tracey McLellan as a practising clinical psychologist is the Corrections spokesperson, when Greg O’Connor is sitting there with several decades of Police experience. We full well know that Corrections and inmates generally are going to get smashed under this government.
Stuart Nash was a loss in 2023 prior to the election, worth mentioning because few in Labour currently have the capacity to hold a useful conversation with business in New Zealand. Nash could comfortably keep up with Mike Hosking on ZB which is now a massive Labour weakness. Damien O’Connor is the sole and strong exception; a true survivor with a huge catalogue of success for our core agribusiness. Jo Luxton owning a childcare centre is never going to gain the credible bonhomie with major business required of social democrats to run this concentrated little country.
But here we get to the big one, and that’s the loss of Grant Robertson. In quite a different style to his mentor Dr Cullen, he confined his interests in the economy to massive subsidies for business, untargeted through the pandemic and sector-targeted thereafter. It was by a long measure one of the world’s largest interventions per GDP capita of any country to sustain the economy during the pandemic. His replacement Barbara Edmonds is like Dr Verrall a public servant to her core, and has about as much daring and adventure in her policy chops as my 19 year old cat.
Hipkins’ elevation of Edmonds and the appointment of Deborah Russell to Revenue shows that Hipkins has plently of intellectual capacity to analyse and discuss tax policy, but is appointing none of the courage to grow a muscle to redistribute wealth away from our absurdly capital-distorted country. Russell has that unique capacity to come from a rock solid Labour electorate, lose it massively, and still get a promotion that befits her bluestocking beltway brain.
Hipkins is also using the elevation of Edmonds and Russell to shank David Parker. Parker is the only guy left with that combination of progressive chops, huge track record, and the merest mote of charisma to be an alternative leader to Hipkins. Hipkins has sent yet another signal to Parker to retire. This leaves Hipkins free to turn the entire Labour effort into an even more ineffectual Wellington-circling wankathon taking two terms to recover from the smashing he got it in 2023.
There’s a major risk that Labour hasn’t finished its big cull of retirements and replacements. They have proportionally lost more power than the Greens have, but both have lost.
Both Labour and the Greens have been weakened beyond the October 2023 election.
They now have gaps that aren’t easy to fill from their substitutes off the bench.
Hipkins and Davidson in their own way are refusing to accept the real power their Parliamentary numbers state they have, and both are too busy jockeying internally to reach across the lines and form a cooperative platform against the hard right.
The new shape of the left is a long way from clarity.
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