Labour’s leadership beauty contest is providing unusual entertainment.
Say what you like about – or indeed in – the blogosphere, it has introduced fabulous new depths to the fear and loathing quotient in politics. Ordinarily, a leadership race is 
an old-fashioned festival of lying and counting. Each candidate ends up with a certain number of knives in the back, and the winner is usually the one who can not only get someone reliable to keep count of the daggers, but also figure out who inserted them and exert the appropriate retaliatory/conciliatory pressure in time to influence the vote.
There’s also an auction quotient, in which middling and ill-favoured caucus members see what preferment they can extract from each candidate and adjust their loyalty accordingly. And readjust as necessary.
There is the trifling consideration of who would be the best leader for the party, and potentially for the country. But generally this question can safely be saved for the post-mortems when it’s too late to interfere with the vote.
This time, however, thanks to the outlet of a variety of left-and right-flavoured blogs, some Labour supporters, including MPs, are now second-guessing the popularity surge of leadership hopeful David Shearer, in case it turns out to be some sort of right-wing plot. Is he, they torment themselves, The Manchurian Candidate? Could he be, unbeknown even to himself, the secret weapon of a sinister right-wing conspiracy, like the brainwashed character in the classic Hollywood movie? After three years of having to suffer the adulation of John Key and the organ-shrivelling humiliation of the polls, Chris Carter, the “gaggle of gays” carry-on and everything else first-term Opposition brings, Labour seems genuinely spooked by a sniff of popularity.
It’s a madder version of what National went through over Bill English. Labour couldn’t say enough in praise of English – especially after National replaced him with Don Brash. That was partly to be irritating, but also because it genuinely found English’s softer, less flinty fiscal and social policy views more to its liking. When a party’s MPs have just taken what still feels like a massive gamble on someone like Brash, this sort of talk from opponents really messes with their heads. It’s also discomfiting that when your policy slate has been overwhelmingly rejected, the whole world becomes an all-knowing taxi-driver who can’t wait to tell you where you went wrong.
Suddenly everyone seems to think you should move your policies nearer those of your opponents, because, this time, right-wing policies have proved more popular than left-wing.
It’s in this context that Labour is finding the overnight sensation of Shearer – on paper the absolute dream leader – so hard to handle.
Is the media championing Shearer because it thinks he’s good – or is it because it thinks he’ll be no match for its darling Key, who, as every devout Labour battler knows, has the media in the pocket of his pinny?
Weirder still, leftist commentators like Chris Trotter, John Pagani and Matt McCarten have come out as pro-Shearer. That’s really suspicious. Is it because they secretly want union heavy Andrew Little to take over later, and they think Shearer would be easier to roll than David Cunliffe? Or are they trying to spike Shearer’s guns by endorsing him, and tip the race to a lefter Cunliffe? Or can they genuinely mean they want Shearer?
No, that last would be too, too creepy.
Most likely, it’s all a double-blind. All these people are evilly talking up Shearer precisely to amp up the fear and loathing, to unnerve Labour into opting for Cunliffe. Or, more trickily, because they know their ruse will be spotted, and this will ensure the caucus does vote for Shearer because they know their opponents are trying to spook them out of it.
And above all, has anyone rung Helen? (Actually, yes. Judith Tizard, who is the former PM’s best bud and handiest local contact, has never been so popular. It is thought She Who Must Be Obeyed has been advising Cunliffe, but the double-blind possibilities inherent in this are fathomless.)
Unexpected though it has been for all concerned – not least Labour itself – Shearer’s surge in profile has underlined the need for hard decisions to be made in Labour. The reflex action of saying, as many in the party did this last week, “We ran a great campaign!” and “We just didn’t sell our policies well enough” may be comforting, but it’s not a strategy. Labour set out to campaign on policies, not personalities, and it failed. Most voters neither liked the policies nor trusted the numbers.
The policies will have to be rethought, and brute logic says that’ll be easier to do under a leader who was not heavily involved and invested in devising them. The other two Davids have campaigned to die in a ditch on the question of GST on fruit and vegetables, axing the national standards and giving more tax credits to beneficiaries. It’s not credible for them to put all these things back on the whiteboard again – nor would they necessarily want to.
Shearer, in not building much of a profile as a first-term MP, has kept his brand neutral. He can be the new broom without having to resile from past rhetoric. He’s also an obvious cruet-set match for Key. What were the odds of finding someone with a personal back-story of achievement even more impressive than Key’s?
He ticks all the other boxes so far: good family man, affable, bright, articulate, pleasant-looking, skeleton-free wardrobe, no known eccentricities.
Cunliffe might be out-pointing him on performance polish and experience. But by now it’s an open secret that Cunliffe is deeply divisive in caucus. A number of influential MPs neither like nor trust him, and that he has been happy to boast about not having the support of retiring leader and deputy Phil Goff and Annette King because they’re old news … well, we all saw what happened when Key was sprung dissing the senior citizenry. And what happened to Act after Don Brash trashed his “friend” Rodney Hide. New Zealanders – even self-preservation-minded Labour MPs – do not like to reward disloyalty and plain bad manners.
There’s also an echo of Brash’s Messiah complex in Cunliffe’s pitch for the job. It’s certainly the done thing to ask what you can do for your country – but when Cunliffe does, it sounds more like a threat. As he once said, “I’m running this show – get back in your box.”
It’s no double-blind to infer that Key and National would far rather face Cunliffe – or, had he not unexpectedly pulled out (and after deadline for last week’s Listener, dammit), David Parker – than the potentially charismatic Shearer across the House. The public focus on such a glam new politician would facilitate Labour’s rehabilitation no end – and deprive Winston of precious media time.
Unless you are an undervalued (read underperforming) Labour MP who has been promised a promotion by Cunliffe, the choice of Shearer seems a no-brainer. Sure, there are risks. As always after a leadership spill, the vanquished may work to undermine the victor. There are other MPs who, for good reason, will still fancy their chances, including Grant Robertson and Andrew Little. And Shearer may, after all, lack the vision and the chops. If he’s not a quick learner, and doesn’t get the wholehearted support of the Labour machine, he might not last.
But there has seldom been a better set of circumstances for a new Opposition leader. Labour’s vote has tanked, but that creates a mandate to bring out fresh new policies and bury mistakes without rancour. Even better, National will struggle to form a government in 2014 because of the collapse of its support parties. Labour doesn’t even have to become more popular than National to stand a better than even chance of retaking the Beehive next time. With a new leader whose heroic history makes it damned difficult to take a dislike to him, it could be all upside for Labour.
But then again, maybe that’s only what they – whoever they are – want us to think. Is it just a coincidence that the pivotal game-changing scene in The Manchurian Candidate – not the iffy remake, obviously, but the 1962 classic with Frank Sinatra – was … A TEA PARTY?
We have received the following letter in response to this column:
Jane Clifton’s December 17 Politics, while up to her usual high standard, left me with a sinking heart. The leadership brawl in the Labour Party to find a popularly acceptable face was depressing to watch, as it seemed to be missing the point: Labour has haemorrhaged voters to the Greens – and, guys, it’s your policy. You’ve lost the middle-class liberal voters who used to support you because they are looking for an alternative approach to tough times; Labour is not providing it, and they are smart enough to vote on policy, not personality.
Both the Left’s “spend and tax” and the Right’s “monetarist belt-tightening” are failing worldwide because they both rely on future growth that seems permanently over because we are hitting hard physical limits – such as rapidly increasing energy costs and land degradation.
The Greens appear to be the only group that has even partly figured out that a preferable alternative might be a different approach: lose economic orthodoxy’s straitjacket and go with socially consensual, environmentally and economically sustainable solutions – hence the party’s success at the polls and a trigger for Labour’s self-disembowelling that may simply push away even more policy-focused supporters.
Another alternative is to keep an obsession with economic growth that has the potential to ruin us financially because it relies on types of growth that may have gone forever. It also has an imbalance of emphasis with the potential to create inequalities that can destroy our society.
David Cohen
(Dunedin North)