NZGames.com Forums - Where to now for Labour?

NZGames.com Forums (https://forums.nzgames.com/index.php)

- Politics (https://forums.nzgames.com/forumdisplay.php?f=41)

- - Where to now for Labour? (https://forums.nzgames.com/showthread.php?t=87498)

Where to now for Labour?

Sounds as if things are off to the sort of start you'd expect:

Yes, David, this week your top priority must be stopping people from talking to the media. THAT's how you fix the worst election result in the history of the modern Labour party.

Quote:

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/ar...ectid=11329992

An extraordinary morning in the Labour Party's wing of Parliament Buildings. There were only two words to describe things - absolute mayhem.

And that was even before Labour MPs had even begun their crucial post-election caucus meeting, at which there was expected to be some very blunt language during a preliminary post-mortem on last Saturday s crushing defeat.

David Cunliffe is fighting tooth and nail to hang on as leader. His chances of doing so would seem to deteriorate further with every wrong tactic and mistaken ploy he uses to shore up his crumbling position.

I thought the aim of you righties on here was to eliminate all other parties accept the national party ? or am I missing something?

No, no. Just eliminate their ability to be effective. The right just don't feel right without anyone to gloat over, belittle or blame. Right?

Form NewNewLabour -

NewNewLabour was a left-of-centre party founded in 2014 by David Cunliffe, an MP and former puppet leader of the New Zealand Labour Party.

NewNewLabour was established by a number of Labour Party members who left the party in reaction to "The 2014 Electoral Slaughter of Labour", the worst defeat since party creation. Cunliffe, who had been among the most vocal critics of Shearer, Jones, Parker, Goff, Mallard, was joined by a number of other members of the Labour Party, such as Jacinda Adern, Laila Harré and Clair Curren, and a number of left-wing activists, such as Lynne Prentice & Greg Presland. Cunliffe was the party's only MP.

Quote:

Andrew Vance @avancenz

David Shearer and Phil Goff are completely ignoring Cunliffe's instructions not to talk to the media. This is war!

Quote:

Originally Posted by Spink

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Querulant

Why are you bring CCS into this?

Just a few points from someone who actually would seriously consider voting Labour:

-If dotcom is out of the picture then that's half the problem sorted. Keys "a vote for Labour is a vote for dotcom" bullshit line was a killer.
-Get a leadership vote out of the way and then their caucus et all start working together.
-Don't concentrate on getting votes back from parties left of them, instead go for the big chunk of centrist voters. This means working on image ie no apologies for being a man or man-ban type stuff - not that this is stuff is bad, it's just over the heads of who you're dealing with.
-concentrate on promoting a few main policies - preferably to do with Housing, job creation and education. After six years most people struggle to name more than one or two National policies.
-Play the MMP game. Let the Greens be left of centre-left. 34+14 > 47.

All common sense points but they are irrelevant if the people representing Labour are fuckups. As Danyl at Dim-post commented today,

Quote:

I hereby present ‘Mclauchlan’s Hierarchy of Political Needs’, a summary of what I believe the majority of non-tribal voters look for when they’re choosing which party to vote for. As with Maslow, the base of the pyramid are the fundamentals: only when these are satisfied does the apex become significant.

Almost all the left-wingers in my twitter feed are bewildered as to how the country could endorse the Key government with its dirty politics and child-poverty and pollution economy, but the non-left-wing activists I’ve talked to about the election were also utterly bewildered as to why anyone would have voted for the inevitable anarchy of the Cunliffe-led Labour/Greens/New Zealand First/Internet-Mana alternative. The left were comparing National and Labour and only seeing the top of the pyramid. Everyone else was looking at Labour’s bottom and judging it pretty hard.

Labour isn’t the only party wanting in the basic unity stakes. The Greens called for an independent audit of Labour’s fiscals and sent out confusing messages about their relationship with National during the final weeks of the campaign (My wife insists these messages were misreported.) And Internet/Mana is the worst thing to happen to left-wing politics for decades. Every time Labour or the Greens launched a policy they’d get back to the office, turn on the news and see Kim Dotcom or the ‘Fuck John Key’ video, or Pam Corkery screaming at the media, all followed by Laila Harre grinning away and explaining that the left couldn’t form a government without her. That’s not Labour’s fault but they should have seen the disaster coming and ruled Internet/Mana out before the campaign even started.

Here’s something else I think Labour got wrong. They don’t understand the fucking electoral system. For the second election in a row they’ve run an FPP election focused on winning electoral seats and seen their party vote decline. They don’t seem to get that this is a problem. Josie Pagani, Mike Williams and Rob Salmond, who are the current official unofficial voices of the Labour Party have all heaped praise on Stuart Nash for winning Napier and Jacinda Ardern for coming close to winning Auckland Central. But Nash won Napier because the Conservative Party candidate split the right-wing vote, and in terms of party votes which is the only vote that matters Labour’s Napier vote fell by almost 1500 votes while Labour’s party vote in Auckland Central declined by over 3800 votes, one of the worst falls in the entire country. Poto Williams is the only Labour MP in the country who actually increased Labour’s Party vote in her electorate but for some reason Nash and Ardern are the ones getting talked up as future leaders. That’s bullshit.

In terms of the party’s direction, if I was them I’d be looking at the seventy or eighty thousand voters they lost to New Zealand First during the last nine months and trying to win them back. That means a more socially conservative Labour Party. It means swallowing dead rats, presumably in the form of public statements distancing Labour from Cunliffe’s apology for being a man and the ‘man ban’ and gender equity policies. This will generate howls of protest and outrage from the activist left, but I think one message left-wing parties will draw from Saturday’s result is that the activist left is loud but microscopically tiny and it doesn’t speak for anyone other than themselves. I’d also be looking to go into 2017 having reached an arrangement with the Greens to campaign as a coalition.

That’s all in the future though. The current priorities are leadership change followed by a period of sustained competence and unity. Voters are suckers for competence and unity.

I have a better idea for Labour.

Disband.

Let the Greens become the main left party. Let them enlist all the ex-Labour members that actually have a good head on their shoulders and are personable.

That would fix nothing. You'd have the same result as now. Can you guess why?

until labour sinks below 18% its not really a historical loss though,is it.

Quote:

Originally Posted by CCS

That would fix nothing. You'd have the same result as now.

Agreed, mostly. It'd be worse I think, as despite the Greens running a saner campaign than Labour did, they've got too much history as "the lefty lunatic fringe" for many of the more moderate swing voters to go Green, and some of their policies are still a little bizzare. Bradford's scent is still firmly attached for some people despite that she's not been in the party for years.

It doesn't help when Russel suggests printing more cash.

Quote:

Originally Posted by CCS

It doesn't help when Russel suggests printing more cash.

SaneER, not necessarily altogether sane.
Yes, agreed Russell needs to forget about that shit.

Quote:

Originally Posted by CCS

It doesn't help when Russel suggests printing more cash.

Indeed. Not because this is a problem in fiat currency (all money is printed), but because people don't grasp this and the lack of understanding can be exploited.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ab

All common sense points but they are irrelevant if the people representing Labour are fuckups. As Danyl at Dim-post commented today,

Quote:

Poto Williams is the only Labour MP in the country who actually increased Labour’s Party vote in her electorate but for some reason Nash and Ardern are the ones getting talked up as future leaders. That’s bullshit.

I agree that the party vote is the most important but disagree that it has anything to do with the local candidate. I also disagree that wining or nearly winning is not an indicator of leadership qualities.

Case in point, my late father was a staunch National voter but actually voted multiple times for the local Labour candidate because he thought the National bloke was a tool-bag.

Yeah same deal, I think. Trev the Duck's opponent was always a shitbag from what I remember.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Spink

Yeah same deal, I think. Trev the Duck's opponent was always a shitbag from what I remember.

Yep, Chris Bishop, lobbiest for Philip Morris. And yet the margin was only 378 votes.

By all accounts Bishop ran a fantastic campaign. Born and bred Lower Hutt, worked harder, knocked on more doors, turned up to more community events, listened to more feedback, worked out what people cared about. When a 31yr-old first-timer takes a 60yr-old 20-year campaign veteran to the wire in a rock-solid Labour seat, that means he's a good candidate.

Could still take it on Specials too.

Was it him back in Pencarrow too? I was more talking about the Pencarrow days but eh!

Quote:

Originally Posted by Cyberbob

A quote from The Standard today:

http://thestandard.org.nz/the-electi...comment-896103

Quote:

Labour people bust their arses working for the people of New Zealand every single day, and all they need in return is for those people to toddle along to their local church, school or marae once every three years and tick two boxes on a piece of paper.

The fact that people can’t be bothered doing even that much is hard to take sometimes.

It’s so tempting to just say ‘hey, we’re disbanding the Labour Party. Since no one wants us we’ll just leave you to perpetual National Party rule. See ya.’

Strap yourself in and feel the entitlement

whos that woman meant to be. looks like no one I can make out..

Yeah Ardern said she doesn't want to do it but a few people think she'll make a good show a while down the track if no one else appears so it makes sense. No idea what she looks like though.

see what I did there

Doesn't matter what she looks like, she can't win her electorate (AklCentral) and the Labour party vote in AklCentral was nearly cut in half between 2011 and 2014. You can't have a List MP who scraped into parliament by the skin of her teeth as Leader.

She'd get massacred if she was leader.

i like her and voted for her but she is way to ogreen to be leader. she would get torn apart.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ab

She could've won if Labour and Green could come up with a sensible strategy. Pull the Green candidate from the running and she would have a much better chance. When I looked at the result the margin of victory for National candidate was smaller than amount of votes going to Green candidate.

However, as others have said, she will get torn apart as a leader.

Unelectable Leader of Labour being propped up by Green Party, a spin doctor's dream. Nah. She's just not popular enough at the moment.

Yeah 2020 maybe. Especially if she gets off her arse and convinces the disaffected 55% of 18-24s who didn't enrol to enrol.

David Parker hasn't put his hat into the ring for the Labour leadership challenge. What does that say about your party if your deputy leader isn't interested in the top job?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Rince

David Parker hasn't put his hat into the ring for the Labour leadership challenge. What does that say about your party if your deputy leader isn't interested in the top job?

He knows how dirty it could get.

Is Parker still fucking Chris Knox's wife?

Pretty low of him if true.

Maybe that's why he's not standing this time, after the BS that Goff pulled when Parker was lining up a challenge?

Even the ABCs know that Robertson's homosexuality is going to be a problem, so they are overcompensating for it.

Quote:

[Mallard] said he did not believe Mr Robertson was a beltway politician.

"I've been to a lot of rugby matches with Grant. I've drunk quite a lot of beer [with Grant]. He supports and likes a lot of weird music. If that's all beltway well maybe he is."

That makes three times in as many days that I've read a quote/heard someone talk about how Grant Robertson likes rugby and watches beer.