Commentary from various perspectives.
Armstrong in the Herald:
Quote:
Shane Jones' shock decision to quit as a Labour MP will lead voters to draw one conclusion and one conclusion only: that he thinks Labour cannot win the September general election.
His departure is close to an unmitigated disaster for Labour. For starters, unlike the bulk of his colleagues, Jones could reach into segments of the vote - especially blue-collar males - who have switched off Labour. He was in the process of switching those traditional relationships back on.
He was a major weapon in helping Labour to win back more of the Maori seats.
Perhaps of most significance, Labour has lost the one man who would have acted as the essential go-between in securing Winston Peters' signature on a post-election coalition or co-operation agreement between Labour and New Zealand First which enabled Labour to govern.
Jones, however, may have seen himself ending up as a paralysed economic development minister in a Labour-Greens coalition which saw him having to constantly battle on behalf of any project with environmental repercussions.
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Godfery at his blog:
Quote:
Shane was socialised into politics off the back of, for lack of a better term, the old left. His introduction to Parliament and the Beehive was while working for Geoffrey Palmer in the fourth Labour government. He would've been a better fit - ideologically - in the Maori Party. He might've had a more successful career in National.
This meant he was neither perfect for Maori nor perfect for the left. (But perfection is a false chalice, yet that didn’t stop many from demanding it). The attacks against women were uncalled for and wrong. The struggle for gender equality shouldn't and can't be divorced from the struggle for ethnic equality. Equality works best when it's equality for the whole and not the parts.
I think many of Shane’s Maori supporters were always willing to recognise that. Yet his opponents rarely acknowledged his significance for Maori and in Maori political history. His place in Maori politics and Maori history was ignored. That was a telling signal to Maori - a people who revere the past and always try to fit their thinking in it. Shane worked because he understood this. He knew what made Maori tick, though it was always undermined by the faults of his political line.
But what was worse – and very neo-colonialist – was being told to wait for someone better. That moment had too much in common with when the radical left realised tino rangatiratanga meant ownership and then Maori suddenly became the new bourgeois. I’ve said it before: Maori politics doesn’t sit apart from the political spectrum, but below it. At least the political right doesn't pretend to be a false friend.
Maori political history isn't rich with choice. Telling us to wait for a more "progressive" candidate is deeply offensive. Maori have waited too long for too little. Shane was an opportunity and one many - including myself - were willing to back. He wasn’t perfect, but he was as close as we’ve come in more than a decade to the centre of power.
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Danyl Mclauchlan at his blog:
Quote:
Almost every senior (male) journalist who went out for beers with him walked away with the notion that ‘the Jones boy’ was going to be our first Maori Prime Minister. And I’ll admit he had a unique style: in a time where most political quotes are cooked up by anonymous staffers, Shane Jones spoke in a voice that was uniquely his own: an odd, nineteenth century mode that often referred to himself in the third person, peppered with latinate tags – just yesterday he denied that Hekia Parata was his ‘benefactrix’. The press gallery – with its usual acumen – decided that speaking like an eccentric Victorian-era Oxford don meant that Jonesy was ‘connecting with working class kiwis’. I never saw any evidence of this. Jones performed poorly as an electorate candidate during multiple elections: actual voters were never as impressed with him as the gallery were. During the Labour leadership campaign Jones’ support among Maori voters was only 37% – which strikes me as shockingly low, considering they’re being offered the chance to endorse a contender for first Maori Prime Minister. It reflects – I suspect – Jonsey’s incredibly low support among female voters across the board.
I guess this is ‘bad for Labour’. It makes them look weak and disorganised, and the gallery will run around wailing that Labour have just lost their brightest star. (I think they’ve lost an undisciplined, waffling misogynist who probably cost them more votes than he ever won.) And it’s good for Grant Robertson, obviously, who may now run for Labour leader unopposed after the election.
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Something I've seen hinted at but not explicitly stated in any published article yet - if National made this happen they're fucking brilliant. Think of all the things that would have to come together.
Sir Wira Gardiner secretly donates to Jones's leadership campaign. Murray McCully informally sounds Jones out as to whether or not Jones really wants to spend another three years on the Opposition benches with a bunch of pakeha unionists, gay-rights activists, and tree-hugging hippies who hate him and hints that a high-level government job focused on Pacific economic development with a resources-slash-fisheries angle may soon be created if the right candidate could be found. Jones sees the writing on the hull and jumps from the sinking Good Ship Labour, which means that the next candidate off the Labour List gets tapped for a return to Parliament and oh ho ho guess who it is - Kelvin Davis. Kelvin Davis, a by-all-accounts bright talented hetero Maori male who got shafted by the sisterhood for being a bright talented hetero Maori male and who got given an embarrassingly low list position before the last election and who lost his job as a result. Being a lowly-ranked List MP who has already once been fucked by the party Kelvin Davis will feel like his hetero male testicles are on a table next to a pile of hammers unless he can win an electorate seat, and his home seat is oh ho ho it gets even better TAI TOKERAU. Which means to have any sort of job security Davis has to defeat Hone Harawira in an electorate race, which means Kelvin Davis has to knock the Mana Party and its parasite Kim Dotcom Party completely out of NZ politics and deprive the Labour Party of an entire coalition partner. Having a bright talented hetero Maori male running on the left in Tai Tokerau means that Harawira and Dotcom will be put under a fucking microscope during the election which is something I'm guessing neither of them want to happen. And this is all now a lot easier for Davis because he's now back in parliament because Shane Jones retired after being offered a job by Murray McCully, and being back in parliament means he gets to run this knock-off-Harawira Tai Tokerau electorate campaign with parliamentary funding.
Possible outcomes:
1. Kelvin Davis runs a good campaign with support from Labour and defeats Harawira in Tai Tokerau. Mana Party out of Parliament. National laughs.
2. Kelvin Davis loses Tai Tokerau when he gets hung out to dry AGAIN by Labour which gives him shitty support in his campaign because they want a possible coalition-partner party in Parliament more than they want a bright talented hetero Maori male on their own team. Labour thus confirms that it a) hates heterosexual males and b) hates Maoris all in one go, thus further pigeonholing itself as an extreme-left party. National laughs.
If McCully (and let's be honest, he wouldn't have done this himself, so let's include John Key) and National actually foresaw these possible outcomes and specifically targeted Jones in order to make them more likely, they have got serious game.
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