Part One: The rose, by any other name, would smell sweeter
When you first become conscious of the existence of a thing, sometimes all you have to go on is what that thing is called. This is the cause of many meaningless semantic arguments on the internet, but a label can be surprisingly powerful as marketing. As a little kid, I liked Helen Clark because she was the Prime Minister, then I liked John Key because he was the Prime Minister. They had distinctive faces and they represented the whole country, and that was all I knew.
National got that same goodwill from me by the same logic - they led the country, ergo they were of us, particularly growing up rural - but they had a cheat code to shortcut to that conclusion: their name. The National Party signals with its self-identification that its first concern is not an ideological priority (Greens, NZFirst) or a group (The Association of Consumers and Taxpayers, Māori) but the entire nation.
Labour does not, and did not get that goodwill from me. Indeed, one of their PMs Labour most loves, Norman Kirk, once admitted to Margaret Hayward, his secretary, he’d rather rebrand to the “New Zealand Party”. What elections that would have made for! Yet instead of New Zealand the Nation versus the Nation New Zealand, we have a contrast. Labour appear, purely through the semantic lens of the totally unfamiliar with politics, like the party of a narrow interest - specifically, a stereotype of the working class, the old images of men in overalls shovelling and sweating.
This may seem attractive to Labour’s sympathisers - the working man who works hard and suffers under the hot sun or harsh white light deserves an advocate - yet history speaks against the success of this narrative. Sliced this way, Labour versus National becomes sectional advocacy for class warfare versus the party that can wed labour with capital, promising to grow the pie instead of tearing it apart to get yours. Just as in the mother country, Labour wins elections…but not as many as National.
Of course, you might say, this vision of the Red Stakhanovite is as simplistic of a picture as it gets. Gain any familiarity with Labour and you can see that they’ve done their part to grow beyond the name and its association with blue collar workers who never went to university. (Note: some blue collar Kiwis have degrees and plenty of white collar Kiwis never went to uni, but blue collar = no degree and white collar = degree is a correlation useful for our purposes today.) They have remained highly competitive against National in appealing to the growing university-educated, white collar class.
The younger a person, the likelier they are to have attained higher education and, once past the entry-level teens and 20s, the likelier they are to have entered white collar work. Labour performs much better than National with younger voters. They sit to the left of National on social issues, too, and white collar voters tend to be more interested in championing progressive causes. Note: plenty of white collar voters are conservatives or otherwise right-wing for obvious reasons - in particular, many people who have got it made are anxious about tax, crime, new housing etc. disrupting their lives. This article is focused on white collar voters from the centre on left plus blue collar voters, and so the right-wing white collar voter is not relevant today.)
That is in large part because white collar voters are likelier to have secured their basic needs - a steady income, stable housing, an educational aspiration - than blue collar voters, and so, with savings mounting and their family seen to, many are less stressed about the government taking and spending their money. Hence, the phenomenon where it is often well-off voters supporting welfare increases, educational improvements, and other policies that they no longer stand to benefit from, if they ever did, and often standing in contrast to their right-wing counterparts by favouring “softness” on crime, defence and other issues.
As we know, Labour experienced growing pains as, like centre-left parties across the West, they expanded to accommodate new centre-left voters. The battles began under PM Muldoon and leader Rowling in the late 70s and early 80s and led to a series of sectional battles. The white collar liberals made common cause with the full on grow the pie revolutionaries, personified by PM Lange (who himself came from a place of representing poor South Aucklanders with his legal education) and Finance Minister Douglas.
That’s what led to the spectacle of a Labour Party seemingly so committed to being a party for all, not just their working class base, that Lange experienced in 1987: “That election night was a great revelation for me. That was an apprehension on my part that we had actually abandoned our constituency. And it set me to think what on earth have we done that we come within 400 votes of winning the true-blue [National] seat of Remuera. And that struck me as being a dangerous flirtation, and an act of treachery to the people we were born to represent.”
Under strain every which way, the party exploded in all directions. Roger Douglas was sacked in 1988 and Labour’s right wing have never retaken the reins since. The old left departed with the likes of Jim Anderton for the Alliance, and found themselves shrinking and shrinking - the Greens seceded to dominate the niche of white-collar lefties, and the rest of the Alliance found out to their detriment that not many proletarians hide the Little Red Book in their gumboots. Of course, one can’t fault the successes of Anderton himself, who held Sydenham/Wigram in Christchurch until his retirement in 2008, the last holdfast where the working class left won.
Geoffrey Palmer - the ultimate erudite, rivalled only in our history by Chris Finlayson - found himself inadequate to the task of replacing Lange and was in turn replaced by Mike Moore, our last working class Prime Minister for a sum total of 59 days. Moore had seen and done it all, everything from serving as an unwitting money mule for the unions to winning a secret war against cancer. And yet, after expanding Labour's caucus by over 50% in 1993 - granted, when you've hit rock bottom there's only one way to go, but he did hold off the Alliance in almost all instances - Moore lost his job.
Ever since Helen Clark took the reins, which she would not relinquish for an astonishing fifteen years, the technocrats have reigned supreme in Labour: centrist, white-collar, university educated and often career politicians, balancing some sops to Labour’s traditional caucuses with a careful management of the economy that in many ways resembles National’s own inchoate sense of being governors first, powerholders second and an ideological movement third.
Every attempt to break their hold from within has failed, just as the Alliance and MANA each did from without. For instance, the closest that working class Labourites have come to controlling the leadership was David Cunliffe, who literally studied politics and did debating at university (shoutout to Otago Debating Society, everybody I meet from there is lovely) before doing a Master in Public Administration at Harvard. I’d also like to apologise to Cunliffe in advance for the strays he’s going to catch much further down this article. Although, to be fair, planning a character assassination while apologising to the target for any errant bullets that might catch them is a bit disingenuous of me.
Well, who was the road not travelled towards connecting with the working class? That would surely have to be Shane Jones, who a) was employed in Māori-related roles in both the public service and lecturing at Victoria University, b) scored at a dismal 15.88% in the vote, winning a higher percentage of his FELLOW MPS than members or unions, and c) promptly jumped ship to NZFirst so he could join Winston in bashing the Māori legal kaupapa they used to do. Basically, he’s a Kiwi Boris Johnson getting by on vibes alone.
Did I mention he also did a Master in Public Administration at Harvard?
We haven’t gotten to see in a long time what a working class Labour Party looks like. Correspondingly, there will always be a hankering from an assortment of perspectives - from left-wing socialists to working class activists to white collar academics - for going back to a focus on the working class first, in membership, message, and policy. I’m sympathetic to that argument.
As I’ve said time and again, if you're uni educated you're likelier to be better off. A white collar approach privileges those with the resources to navigate our society, while continuing to leave in place an unfair deal for people working hard - and often sacrificing their physical health to do so. The case for a working class revival may be a difficult argument to make in young and uni educated circles, but it's an essential requirement for any left-wing party to genuinely live up to its principles, improve economic mobility and reduce inequality, and in turn to keep working class people bought in to established political institutions and avoid the populist drift we’ve seen overseas.
Reaching back out to working class Kiwis and encouraging them to stand for Parliament is Labour’s way of getting in touch with the country outside of Wellington: what people want and how to give it to them. The alternative are career politicians and other neophytes without practical experience across large chunks of the economy or empathy for various challenges they have never lived through themselves, and continuing to walk down that path was why we got the ineffectual Sixth Labour Government. That’s, if I do say so myself, a decent summation of the case.
Here’s how not to make that case.
Part Two: Stumbling down big rock candy mountain
Chris Trotter’s goofily named “Leading Labour off the big rock candy mountain” and Bryce Edwards’ subsequent article in the NZ Herald a couple of weeks ago prompted this article. They critique Labour losing touch with the working class, left wing, Māori and unions and suggest a leader to unite them again and lead them to success in 2026.
They do so without a semblance of skill, vision, or basic persuasion.
Chris Trotter first. He’s one of New Zealand’s longtime resident leftie opinionaires. Though he once walked with Jim Anderton, he now works for the Free Speech Union. I am in good company because I do not like Chris Trotter. He strikes me the way some other free speech evangelists like Damian Grant do, white guys who’ve never experienced certain discrimination, bellow rudely about other groups, and then feel the walls of 1984 closing in when other people yell back at them to shut the fuck up. I’m not super anti free speech, I just think the cause seriously sucks at recruiting compassionate, persuasive voices instead of bitchers and moaners like him. The fact that I think this article is dogwater is a symptom of the fact that Chris Trotter wrote it not because I’m dismissing him out of hand, but because Chris Trotter writes bad arguments and this is no exception.
This first article’s name criticises “utopianism”, the idea that political theories (far more commonly on the left) sometimes drift towards promising not just improvement and addressing crises but heaven for everybody. Criticising utopianism is popular - everybody loves a grinch! - and he’s particularly right to identify one of the most blatant forms of utopianism all parties and their devotees practice - thinking you can win every election. You can’t! You have to accept you’re going to lose some, and plan how things can be as least-bad as possible while your opponents are in charge.
He never returns to this theme. That’s weird. It’s especially weird because the populist tides he encourages has done more to wreck Labour’s achievements in government - most famously, Muldoon executing Labour’s compulsory superannuation scheme - than, for instance, Labour’s technocrats implementing Working For Families and leaving National’s technocrats to bed the policy in.
He launches into an example - people who write articles often seem to feel the need to pick a roundabout and overly specific example only tangentially connected to their point as their starting point - and, sure, we should teach the basics brilliantly instead of Chippy daydreaming about hippie vibes education, I guess. Though it seems a bit weird not to respond to Chippy promoting “Practical life skills like home budgeting, how to prepare a healthy meal, and how to look after your own health” - these seem awfully helpful day to day for kids who will never go to university or apply high-level concepts in the workplace, especially when many kids don’t learn these things growing up.
The article rather awkwardly segues to talking about how Labour’s party hierarchy can’t make change, so change can only come from changing the leader. Look, I love talking up leader swaps, but that’s fun punditry for people like me, not what serious analysis should be all about. Labour need change throughout their local party electorates who often resist the wishes of the central party hierarchy, as when they foisted Helen White on Mount Albert, if they are to change the character of their caucus. They must do that only to swing a decisive bloc in Labour’s leadership elections but also because Labour needs a whole Cabinet worth of good MPs - not simply a leader swap.
Nonetheless, we’ve arrived at the point of the articles: who should be the next leader of the Labour Party to get back in touch with its various branches? The first bit of laziness here is that the case for replacing Hipkins is not made in the first place! Sure, Trotter dismisses the "social-liberal dogma" of Chippy and his education policy - a subject on which he was noticeably quiet during the election - but policy is only related to, not dictated by, who is the leader. Put another way, an (extremely unlikely) grassroots revolution at all layers of the hierarchy could foist policy change onto him, and more importantly, changing leader does not guarantee the desired policy changes.
Trotter’s three alternatives are as follows. He counts out that Kieran McAnulty wants to run, as does Edwards. I’m a sceptic but we’ll take him at his word and move on. I just wish that Trotter had deleted his first several paragraphs of superfluity to give himself room to discuss McAnulty because, even if I don’t find the man interesting, what he represents - Labour’s chances in the regions, and what that means for the party in a post-FPTP era - is interesting.
For that matter, why not raise anybody else? Barbara Edmonds seems like the obvious choice to keep an eye on for the future, though in keeping with my “cede 2026” recommendation I’d rather Chippy just take the bruises of losing that election and let an untainted Edmonds take over. What about a Michael Wood return lmao okay okay I kid. Carmel Sepuloni doesn’t want to coup Hipkins, I agree. Instead, the third alternative, the one that the party should elevate to the leadership, and to contend for Prime Minister, is…
Willie Jackson?
Willie Jackson?!
Called it.
Nothing screams faithful Labour marching soldier like the guy who, once finally coaxed into the Labour camp, fought Labour (rightly) on charter schools and scrapped with Andrew Little over his own list placement. I mean, hell, if he truly is so loyal and unlikely to replace Chippy, as Edwards claims, I don’t know why we’re having this conversation. If he’s not loyal, then that seems like an ill omen for his leadership.
Well, fine. Let’s talk about whether Willie Jackson should lead the Labour Party and try to get elected as our next Prime Minister.
Key to this uniting premise is that Willie straddles three groups - the left, the unions and Māori - through his history traversing the working class. That doesn’t mean he can harness any of these well. I believe that, were he to run for Labour leader, the unions would give him a look, and fall in behind him if he won. Yet are lefties looking to him as their champion? Maybe if he's the only one promising to give them their capital gains or wealth tax.
As for Māori, Trotter botches an analogy here. He presents the concept of “only Nixon could go to China”: Nixon spent decades building an unparalleled reputation as a mini-McCarthy, a fierce Cold Warrior with a treasure trove of experience, then suddenly shocked the world by flying to Beijing and kickstarting an alliance with the Chinese Communist Party.
"Only Nixon could go to China" argues that nobody perceived as softer on communism or on defence could have done that and survived the backlash for giving in to the communists - but because Nixon did it, nobody could possibly credibly accuse him of being weak on communism. Instead, he was hailed for his masterful statesmanship. The phrase is since used as an analogy for situations where a fierce critic of something is the only viable option as the spokesperson for that thing, because they’re insulated against criticism by association.
The trouble with trying to apply that analogy to Jackson as a critic of Māori is that “Nixon goes to China” is a very simple analogy about a dichotomy. Māori politics are notoriously difficult to easily force onto a left-right plane and perspectives are far more fractured. Almost everybody agreed Nixon was tough enough to too tough on communism.
However, some Kiwis already think Jackson doesn't do enough for Māori - as we saw at the last election, TPM overwhelmingly won the argument amongst voters in the Māori electorates that Māori's Labour MPs, Jackson a leading figure amongst them, were not doing enough for Māori. Their narrative primarily focused on everyday Māori issues and big conversations about the nation rather than iwi specifically. Jackson as leader won't reassure them, particularly once, as leader of a kaupapa Pākehā party, he starts to focus less on Māori; TPM will continue to successfully make its argument and hold the Māori seats.
On the other hand, his criticisms of iwi are unlikely to reassure Pākehā voters who think he does too much for Māori. Even setting aside racists who will slander him from the start and stick with NZF and ACT, the swing voter uncomfortable with the role of Te Tiriti under Labour is not going to be reassured by arcane, technical takes on iwi settlements, because only those affected by such settlements actually keep up with them.
Nor will rhetoric alone work, because as Opposition leader he'll have such a struggle to get attention. If he uses his precious time in the public eye to brand himself as an anti-iwi crusader, it'll come off more as internecine conflict in Māoridom than an affirmative agenda for all races. And, of course, I suspect he’s not really that anti-iwi and certainly as Labour leader would be boxed in - this is just Chris Trotter projecting his own desired political agenda onto him.
The technocratic impulses of Labour will rein him in while the right merrily brand him as a servant to Māori, making little distinction between ordinary Māori and iwi elites. The more Willie goes off script and vents any frustrations he has with iwi, the further that will drive away Māori voters. Some of them dislike an iwi-centric approach. However, we all know the rallying effect criticism can have coming from somebody clearly trying to appeal to a different audience. Not only that, it’ll be providing Luxon the perfect chance to look like the statesman comparatively and bring your Finlaysons out to ding Jackson for being unprofessional and undiplomatic.
All this to say that simply making a Māori populist your leader doesn't solve the challenge of posturing around and delivering for Māori voters. I don't have the solution, but neither does Trotter. Instead, he simply throws to the claim that Jackson’s ad campaign won all the Māori electorates for Labour in 2017.
Reasons why this is cap:
In every election from 2008, the Māori Party lost at least one Māori electorate. Their vote share halved after going into the coalition with National in 2008, and while they staunched the bleeding past 2011, the underlying fundamentals - most Māori electorate voters do not want a National government - were working against them. Moreover, the Māori Party had already done plenty of damage to themselves with their perceived overemphasis on iwi over ordinary Māori; Labour’s ad campaign just pushed the knife in deeper.
Jacindamania??? Yo????? Labour had 800,000 electorate voters in 2014 and almost a million in 2017. A surge in turnout, bringing out old Labour stalwarts and young lefties keen to get rid of National alike, was always going to be enough to deal the deathblow to them.
Alongside Jacinda, Labour elevated their first deputy leader, Kelvin Davis. While he may be a meme these days, back then he was coming in hot as a critic of conditions on Christmas Island and of Corrections processes. Even if some Māori voters only tuned in for one clip that whole campaign, for a lot of them that clip was Davis confidently and assertively addressing reporters in te reo right after he got the gig. Undoubtedly, he played a part.
It’s intuitively incredibly obvious that this is the wrong conclusion to draw. Why it’s so intuitively, incredibly obvious is for exactly the reason that Trotter has identified: it’s precisely because Willie Jackson is focused first and foremost on advancing class interests over the world of iwi and Te Tiriti. Willie Jackson was brought into the Labour Party as the Māori Campaign Director, but by this point in time Labour were already holding six out of seven electorates, against a Māori Party on the ropes and a MANA Movement left in ruins after the Kim Dotcom debacle - indeed, polling from this time shows that the opposition to Labour was so weak that a quarter of the vote in Waiariki, the only electorate still held by a Māori Party MP (and a co-leader at that!), was ready to go to NZFirst. His first priority was not to win the Māori electorates, because one more electorate would not swing the balance. His job was to turn out disengaged urban Māori. Hey, you know where most disengaged urban Māori voters are? Tāmaki Makaurau. Which Peeni Henare had already won in 2014. Not Waiariki, TPM’s last battleground.
So, basically, Trotter is doing that annoying thing some pundits do where they just make whatever up to fit the argument of the week, instead of carefully considering the data and comparisons they have to work with. That subjectiveness is epitomised by him deriding "the soft, middle-class centres of Labour’s box of chocolates" - which mostly makes me hungry, but I'm going to put a pin in this type of rhetoric for later. All I can say to conclude is that Chris Trotter claiming Willie Jackson will lead Labour down from the Big Candy Rock Mountain is not credible. He’s not the sensible, down to earth option - this is the flight of fancy!
Part Three: Could Willie be loved
Bryce Edwards hails from Vic Uni's pols lecturers and is one of the better known faculty. This is largely because he has a tendency towards mid takes.
Right off the bat we're hearing about how he just attended the Oxford Union debate and is comparable to David Lange...but the world has changed. Lange's wit would keep him in good stead today but soaring oratory and quick-thinking debating capacity is no longer a priority. I regularly touch on NZ political history in the interests of being educational and contextualising my points, but let's be real: history is just that, and it's usually not that relevant to what people are thinking, even if it's often an important foundation for the world around us.
The danger of a commentator unable to get with the times bleeds through in the language Edwards chooses: to him, Jackson is a "loud-mouth scrapper", "bellicose and mongrel". The former is a pretty reasonable description; the latter has undertones of stereotyping a Māori political figure as an angry and uncivilised brown man.
Especially when you consider that the last NZ political figure to regularly be described as a "mongrel" and with similar terms was...Simon Bridges, the first and only Māori leader of either of the major parties. Especially especially in a country where you usually hear the word mongrel to do with the Mob, often stereotyped as angry, uncivilized brown men. To paraphrase a piece of poetry (and bastardise the point in the process), "we don't wanna hear you say mongrel no more". I'm sure plenty of people call themselves and their mates that and they're cool with it, I’ll quote Willie’s ex-wife later describing him that way, but an Edwards or a me should show some respect.
Anyway, what other out of touch conceptions does Edwards want to toss in? To him, Jackson is the most left-wing Labour MP, the supporting evidence being "he was in the Alliance once". The Alliance were a church so broad they tried to recruit Winston Peters and successfully wooed National Party members Hamish MacIntyre and Frank Grover, who later broke away to the Christian Heritage Party; Alamein Kopu, who kept the National government in power in ‘99; and Gilbert Myles, who quit within months to join NZFirst as his fourth party in three years.
In fairness, I can’t effectively dispute the claim that Willie Jackson’s is Labour’s most left-wing MP because I don’t have an alternate name I’d nominate for most left-wing. (I just also can’t point to any distinctly left-of-Labour policy initiative that Jackson has ever championed.) I'd suggest David Parker, despite his contradictory moments on the basis of his being the single MP willing to stick up the most for Labour's leading left-wing policy option (CGT/wealth tax).
What I'm trying to get across here is that in New Zealand, parties are too small and tightly controlled to exhibit the kind of open debate we see in the UK and elsewhere. Ergo, it's hard to get a clear read on the ideological underpinnings of most MPs, and they often shift with the circumstances. Grant Robertson was once perceived as a liberal in large part simply because he was gay, then as a centrist a smidge to the right of Ardern because of his years as Finance Minister, then he turned around to become a wealth tax advocate. It’s not fixed for most MPs and it’s not the most importnat thing.
Jackson is another MP with the self-confidence and longevity to evolve plenty over his career. I would suggest that his underlying underpinnings as being focused on everyday material conditions over reading up on Das Kapital implies he's probably not a doctrinaire leftie the way a Michael Wood is. Remember - Jackson's defining policy stand staked out against the centrist Labour Party was to its right, on charter schools! And all of this is especially true for a kaupapa Māori politician where, as previously established, the political compass is even more fluid. Hone Harawira served three years in a coalition with the National-ACT-United Future government! Willie will wander not where satisfies the litmus tests of the left, but where serves Māori - and Willie’s ego.
Would Willie Jackson provide a contrast to the technocratic class? Yes, absolutely. He’s not a fraudulent grifter; he genuinely is quite different from a lot of Labour’s other MPs, in that mold of the working class MP that has become so rare these days. However, there’s a reason that the technocrats won the battle for the soul of Labour, and you can’t overcome an opponent if you don’t understand them. They’re good at presenting themselves as the electable ones who can be trusted with governance in a way the populists can’t.
Some people - like the Labour membership - are spoiling for a fight and looking to channel that populism...but it's that 56% of voters who say the government spends about the right amount of money, who think the budget was okay or better, who are in charge of the country’s political fortunes right now. Labour needs 7% of them to swing across the aisle and deprive Luxon's coalition of their majority. You can't get those swing voters by scaring them towards you. and they're not going to be scared away from the right any time soon. That leaves inspiring or attracting them, and we haven’t seen anything to suggest Willie can do that.
Chippy, technocrat extraordinaire, is bland, but he is disciplined. He never causes Labour a problem headline and people know it. (This is subjective, but as a fierce critic of his choices last year, I think he’s better liked than his numbers show - most people frowned on the Labour government under him and nobody's thinking about him being back in now, but I believe his boyish cheeriness endears him to a lot of people and doesn't put off many.
He’s never going to dominate the preferred PM polls but he’s not a drag either, as we’ve seen from the competitive left/right bloc polling. As I said earlier, it’s okay for him to lose another even if the new government is not itself on stable ground.
And he can easily embrace a new position on tax precisely BECAUSE Nixon can go to China!!! Unlike a David Cunliffe, he doesn't appear like an out-of-touch ideologue. He can credibly say that, as Prime Minister, he had to make the hard call to set down tax reform and focus on addressing Cyclone Gabrielle and steering through the cost of living crisis. Now that he's in Opposition and looking to plan for the future, and learning fast as leader, he can become the chief campaigner for a wealth tax to better New Zealand’s future, with the public able to contemplate the idea without expecting its imminent implementation. If, of course, that's what he wants to do. If he doesn't, there’s no problem.
So, then, Edwards, what’ll make Willie so much better than The Chip?
He’s a communications disaster!!!! He was one of the biggest stories of the wheels falling off the Labour train in the end as he botched the Broadcasting portfolio so badly as to be making inappropriate jokes about leaning on broadcasters, when a key conspiracy theory amongst right-wing partisans is that the government was abusing the PIJF to purchase favourable courage. His extensive and varied political experience has not translated to discipline or competence that we have seen on any front.
Edwards returns us to the theme of retaking the Māori seats. Yet, from a purely electoral perspective, Labour clearly didn’t calculate too far to the right on Māori matters - their co-governance policies painted the biggest race-baiting target on their back since 2004-5 for National to woo swing voters with, and other decisions and attitudes fed into narratives around Labour failures on everything from healthcare (racial scoring in triaging) to crime (racist stereotyping).
“Of course, for many, Jackson is seen as “part of the problem”. As leader of Labour’s Māori caucus and Minister for Māori Development, he led the co-governance agenda, along with Nanaia Mahuta. And he famously defended elements of that agenda with some anti-democratic statements.” EXACTLY!!! (Also, what did Edwards mean here by saying Jackson’s politics are “more complicated than…Mahuta”? I just want to talk.)
Labour didn’t lose all 7 Māori seats because they advanced an agenda for redressing Māori inequities more progressive than theirs in 2005 (where they won 3 Māori seats), 2008 (2 Māori seats), 2011 (3 seats), 2014 (5 seats), 2017 (7 seats) and 2020 (6 seats). They lost because they made the curious choice to stick their neck out then leave their guard down when the throat punch came. Many Māori voters were frustrated with Labour failing to confront and call out racism and leaving Nanaia Mahuta out to dry, without even getting any enticing economic policies as a tradeoff for that sacrifice. TPM were clearly the most visible defenders of the Treaty and critics of the racists, and they got the most votes as a reward. Or, put another way, TPM were responsive to racial polarisation; Labour were not.
The class-related arguments in the article are good and I agree with them. I’ll be making the case soon in this piece that appealing to the working class doesn't mean tossing out social progressivism, but there's a distinction to be made between progressive policies that protect people's freedoms and rights versus forms of identity politics and other vibes-based presentational choices where you just lose people. Fair play.
Nonetheless, Duncan Grieve is absolutely correct to suggest that Willie Jackson has a 1% chance of becoming leader. If we look at Grieve's reckons on who should be leader and contemplate a few options, Megan Woods remains a key part of the Labour engine and I like her but she doesn’t seem to have the PR skills to step up and really make the case against the government or for Labour. I would love for David Parker to run purely because it’d be great fodder for analysis, but also, uhh, no. I truly do not know what there is to say about Peeni Henare. I guess he should run so we learn more about him? He’s clearly raring to rise.
Carmel Sepuloni would see Labour step closer towards its diverse and dare I say working class base in Auckland, and I think she’d hold up well under the pressure, but, again, it's hard to see her achieving a ton of cut through - if Chippy decides he wants to go, though, she’d certainly be my preferred option to give a three year trial and check for potential while building up Barbara Edmonds.
Given that Edwards, like Trotter, has made practically no counterarguments against Jackson, yet still acknowledges that others hold such strong reservations, one can only conclude the obvious: these pundits say provocative things to keep earning their pay writing these columns, because this got clicks in a way that “actually, Chippy should stay as leader until 2026” wouldn’t. Usually, I don’t get sucked in by instigators - I stayed firmly away from “woke sushi”, easily the most desperate and obvious bait of the year so far - but I’d already had a lot of thoughts about blue and white collar politics rattling around and this has proved the perfect place to explore them.
Willie, supposedly, has the edge of being able to harness populism to magic away all of his flaws. That’s not how it works. Trump hasn’t won the popular vote and has always been unusually unpopular for a Republican presidential candidate. Where populism helps to mitigate the harm of your flaws is winning over the sympathy of the public who see an attack on you as an attack on them due to their shared traits. Willie Jackson is a multi-millionaire (and not the Sanders "American dream" kind) best known for his political associations with an unpopular government and hobbled by the hostility of racists. I’m sure he can rally a few lefties and Māori voters when he comes under attack, but most people will see the attacks and simply say “yeah, I agree, it was stupid to make this guy leader”.
Similar logic applies to identifying with him. Ironically, this article is a great example of the identity politics it criticises. Just as I regularly make weak identity-based judgements without further information, and am working to scale that back, simply being from an ethnic group doesn't mean you automatically inspire that group. Rishi Sunak and Paula Bennett (hot take: also Kamala Harris - still waiting for anybody to mention that she’s Indian-American) are just a couple of examples of where groundbreaking advancements for people of colour have not seen rapturous celebrations. Jackson may be the first Māori PM, but he’s not somebody new and fresh and carrying the hopes of a generation like Kiri Allan could have been or Obama was. Nobody looks at Jackson and gets excited at the prospect he could be the first Māori PM - you have to believe he could actually get there and picture him in the role first, and neither is happening.
Jackson’s visible? Herald op-eds are not a measure of relevance. I read a fair bit of news still these days despite scaling back and even I don’t read them. The problem with Willie Jackson is that he’s always visible for the wrong reasons. All we’re really left asking every time he pokes his head above the parapet is…why is he still here? There's no key policy work for him to do given the death of the RNZ-TVNZ merger, he's not going to advance any further in Labour's hierarchy, and he's been an activist for four decades straight, two thirds of his time on this earth. Approaching his retirement age, even if he wants to contribute more in another role, surely he's looking forward to leaving Parliament.
Knowing that he chose to stick around, part of that will be helping to stabilise and unite the party. Nonetheless, though, one can only conclude that, ironically enough, he's here in order to help win back the Māori seats from TPM. That wasn’t a key priority in 2017, but it’s critical in 2026, when there's so many gains to be made and Labour risks losing his historical stranglehold on the seats if they get used to choosing a left-wing alternative. And it probably won't work, because TPM have harnessed the power of the youth and nothing could convince me that Willie Jackson can tap into that.
The case for Jackson across these two articles is dismal. All we get is glowing upside; these authors do not want to take a fair and balanced perspective of their subject, never mind use common sense or consult the popular public perception of Willie Jackson. And, as I’ve implied time and again through this article, around Willie Jackson’s gaffes, his reputation, his always being visible for the wrong reasons, that leaves a glaring omission.
[Fair warning: the next few paragraphs frankly discuss victim blaming towards victims of sexual assault, and there is going to be a paragraph on domestic abuse down the line. Skip ahead to past the horizontal line if you’d like to dodge victim blaming, and the pair of paragraphs on abuse will be the only two written in blue instead of black.
For a wide variety of reasons, rape culture taps a nerve with me and I often return to griping about it, frequently while struggling to find the words to do so. Like I am right now, writing this! I get insecure. In the context of a political blog that means talking about politicians and that culture, which can feel strange to keep bringing up time and again. However, it's obviously essential to do here when it comes to Jackson; I just want to make clear that the blog should be a safe space for anybody to have a laugh at me ripping into bad takes without feeling triggered by such serious subjects, and I'll always have warnings where they're needed. Lmk if I need to add any or have addressed any issues thoughtlessly!]
Part Four: From working class hero to being an asshole
So...we all remember Roastbusters, right? New Zealanders were conspiring to commit unspeakable sexual violence, the cops did sweet fuck all to protect or defend traumatised children and indeed only contributed by telling them it was the fault of their choices to exist as girls. Nobody was ever convicted. We moved on and never spoke again of this embarrassment - a pouring on of shame and insecurity for all those watching injustice, a disaster I struggled to comprehend at the time.
And Willie Jackson and John Tamihere decided to fire up RadioLive that week. A friend of a victim called in to try to put into words some of the horror she'd seen inflicted on her friend. They sat back and heard all that. They didn't connect to that. They didn't thank her for her bravery or encourage other girls, women, and every other New Zealander vulnerable to this violence.
They condescended to her that "Girls shouldn't be drinking anyway, should they?", exactly the kinds of attitudes that keep people from reporting that they've been attacked in a violent crime and live rent-free in their thoughts for months or years as the voices of trauma on the side of the perpetrators.
They called rape "mischief".
They asked "how free and easy are you kids these days?"
Kids.
Kids.
You could look at Moana Maniapoto, who comes at this from her perspective as Willie's ex-wife willing to frankly admit to his faults. “I thought the comments in their interview were unacceptable, and I told Willie that. He took all the criticism on board, apologised then, and is still apologising three years later. There are still those who frame him now as less a devil’s advocate and more the devil incarnate. But given the failure of Willie’s most vocal critics to deal to star Pākehā broadcasters with a history of consistently spouting crap stuff about women, and Māori in particular — I’m putting racism near the top of my whiteboard, next to power plays. Andrew Little [then the Labour leader who chose to admit Jackson] rightly believes Willie shouldn’t be defined by his Roast Busters interview — that everything he’s done off air and the people he represents, count for something.”
Or you could look at Christchurch's Poto Williams, who, as the one whose job it was to actually speak on these issues for the party, said "I do not believe that his attitude towards victims of sexual abuse match what I expect of a member of the Labour Party. Especially a member of our caucus.” After meeting with Jackson, she relayed from their "robust and honest conversation" that "He realises he still has more to learn about the issues of sexual violence. In that regard I hope to help him increase his understanding and our conversations will continue."
I am willing to hear arguments that he is utterly sincere and now works entirely against, not for, rape culture. I cannot and will not absolve him for what he chose to say that day. This shit is really bad. This messes people right up. I cannot look at that and not think of all the New Zealanders who have already been subjected to the worst of violent and traumatising crime; who have then summoned the bravery to go to friends, family, coworkers, bosses, teachers, police, all other figures worthy of trust; and have found these other human beings cannot find it in themselves to offer any empathy, understanding, or willingness to learn. Just telling them that they chose to hurt themselves this badly - that even after the perpetrator made this choice, the victim's first and only responsibility is to protect them - that this doesn't happen to somebody like the victim, be it because they're a man or not "worth" attacking or simple denial.
Fuck me, man, they’re Kiwi kids. How can you give off so few fucks about their safety?
Leaders protect people. Especially children. And when they’ve been hurt, they try to make them feel safe and give them hope that they can get better again.
Not kick them when they’re down.
In the spirit of Maniapoto’s words, let’s move on to criticise the voices - maybe Edwards, I don’t know his writings well, but especially Trotter - who get to escape scrutiny for the weird crap they say. As I mentioned earlier, they’re practising the same strange idpol I’m trying to finesse my relationship with, categorising a person’s merits and meaning to others by their race and indeed class.
Of course class is often an important signifier of one’s experiences: that’s exactly why we’re talking about the importance of politicians who can speak in that language and be genuine with people. There is a fundamental assumption, though, underlying all of these arguments - the advocacy for the loud-mouth scrapper over the soft chocolate middle-class technocrats - that Trotter and Edwards and everybody else who makes this case assumes is so obvious - much like Jackson’s own unblemished virtue - that they never bother to flesh it out.
That assumption is that the working class is conservative. More precisely, that most working class people don’t give a shit about what we'd fancily label socially progressive causes. Just like Winston Peters, they extol “hard”, masculine virtues, those of the freezing worker who put his - definitely his - back into it and got sold out by the effete politicians in Wellington. If only they have a PM to vote for as much as the scrappy underdog as them.
Just as it's daft to treat any ethnic group as an immune shield against racism, nationalism, or any other of humanity's innumerable foibles, on account of people of all races being 1) individuals who are 2) human, working class people are just New Zealanders too. There isn't some mythical mass on the factory line all growling and swearing and complaining about white collars just waiting to be mobilised. There are hundreds and hundreds of thousands of individuals, all, just like any of the rest of us fortunate enough to happen to go to uni or get jobs sitting at desks, with our own family stories, favourite haunts, deepest dreams and bare insecurities.
Just as racism bad, so too is reducing humanity on the basis of class bad. It's just far less directly discussed - partly because people don't like to think about it and partly because people's approaches to the subject can be cringeworthy. I'm just throwing at the wall and seeing what sticks myself. I can't say if I'm near the right analysis, I just know it's obvious and yet underappreciated that our ever greater understanding of each other mustn't have an income threshold to participate.
Working class people have all kinds of reasons not to jump to a message of "screw the iwi and bugger off with your identity politics", just like white collar people do. Some are just bought in lefties, be it from a union background or social media. Others have developed an affection for institutions or groups - after all, iwi employ many people! Ngāi Tahu have one of the best reputations of any business actors in the South Island. Still others may not have much of an affinity for the progressive side of things, but roll their eyes at disingenuous politicians - but I repeat myself - who try to capitalise on these issues. Culture warring is usually embarrassing and desperate to people looking on from the outside. (Woke sushi.)
Of course plenty of working class people are more conservative and can't stand any of this "wokeness" from the political elites. Yet many more are more progressive, and they can. New Zealand's a pretty progressive country and the West is quite progressive right now! A quarter century ago Slim Shady was shock jockeying for pole position in the rape culture, and now he's on his death bed and Kendrick Lamar's taking breaks in between advocating caring for your daughter to demand thy neighbour love transgender people.
And the main reason why so many working class people smile on many a progressive initiative or attitude is because, when you get away from the vague and purposeless cultural battles, many progressive concerns directly and significantly target people's lives. Working class parents worry about the mental health of their gay kid getting bullied at school. Working class guys are as grateful as their partners that it's an option for them to get an abortion. Working class immigrants want to bring the rest of their family into the country and wish the xenophobe at their work wasn’t so insufferable to deal with. Working class friends hope their friend doing three months on the inside for a DUI will make it, because they don't know if he's cut out for it and they've heard things about conditions at Waikeria.
And above all, the great scourge of New Zealand that so many people, from around the community right up to our politicians, seem not to even think about is violence in the home. That is precisely the challenge that needs to be fought in working class communities, breaking cycles of poverty, trauma, and heavily disrupted family structures. And just as with all of these issues, that gets harder when our leaders of the culture - be they politicians or shock jocks - talk tough against others and shame those who speak out, be it a man speaking to abuse from a woman or a victim who calls out a trusted member of the community, and that gets easier every time somebody stands up, expresses empathy, and invites victims, whatever their story, to come forward.
This uses exactly the same logic as with SV earlier. The more we can increase the faith of Kiwis that they can turn to those they should be able to trust. The more that that trust is well-placed, the safer our communities will be from violent crime and all other disruptions of the right to control and safety over one's life, and the faster they can start healing. Any meditation on bringing a political party back to its working class roots by abandoning even lukewarm efforts to confront many of the issues that destroy the lives of working class people of all ages and backgrounds is not serious - just cosplay.
There's one thing in particular I'm dead certain that this speaks to, and it's that these wishcasters are ALWAYS men. You NEVER see female pundits calling for a working class revival. Their vision of the working class simply as men in overalls on the factory line is not valueless: those workers exist and deserve solutions. Particularly as age wears on them and their bodies physically break down sooner, they need our support.
But we’re not the United States.
The picture of our working class can't be dominated by foreign images of angry factory working white men in the Midwestern United States. In New Zealand, the working class roles growing into the future are not mining, logging, farm labour (often bizarrely forgotten in left-wing theory because of the role of the farmer as capital), factory factory factory - it's cleaners and carers, stereotypically "women's work", often immigrants. Contra the mantra to keep out immigrants to protect the jobs of the working class, precisely because immigrants come in to do working class jobs, ergo, they are a vital part of our working class, growing faster than our multi-generation working class.
All of that is ever more vital because of the rampant abuse of migrant workers by Kiwi business owners, looking to make a quick buck at the expense of another human being's health and freedom. Migrant exploitation is the quintessential example of what a working class movement should be standing up against: capital wielding its unfair leverage over labour, and our most vulnerable blue collar workers at that, to extract profit. A Labour Party hostile to immigrants is caught flat-footed every time one of these myriad stories leaks into the news. They cannot, with their current attitudes and priorities, lead the charge that needs to happen to tighten up scrutiny and strike a fair deal for migrants. Labour, like National, are responsible for ensuring that, however many immigrants we do admit, when they are the government, every single migrant worker will be welcome and safe here.
Our working class are not overwhelmingly producers of goods in manufacturing or other sectors - between the farmers and white-collar capital like tourism, NZ has a pretty good hold on economic generation without needing to build Teslas - but the support staff for the population, blue collar, white collar, children and retired alike. And the blinkered biases of bitter middle aged white men stops them seeing our own country for what it is, so they download hallucinatory fragments of a working class that never was from British socialist anthems and op-eds about how Trump might be incompetent but he spoke to a constituency that the Democrats weren't.
Picture how a Willie Jackson leadership would intersect with this real world, when he founds his message around speaking to the freezing workers in the regions. He's unpopular; he doesn't resonate with most people. His appearances in the media, getting off on the wrong foot from the start after relitigating Roastbusters, are as ill-judged as those of fellow "political scrapper" Simon Bridges. Like Bridges, spark speculation about whether the party chose the wrong leader after all, or if he’s a neo-Muldoon, a populist route the country has already tried for Prime Minister and collectively agreed not to do again.
And his abrasiveness, his points of difference and personality, are aggravating to politicians, party members, unions, and everybody else that Labour needs to keep on side. Mike Moore and his boorish "brat pack" lost the war to keep Labour in working hands because so many women in the party infrastructure couldn't stand them. So too would Willie 4 Leader cause a rupture with the Poto Williamses of the party. All of that means more navel gazing and punditry round-and-round and less of reaching disengaged working class voters.
While Labour aren't speaking to them, the other parties do. NZFirst stay competitive in that niche of those left behind in the regions, but their existence proves only the futility of an "old left" crusade in New Zealand. Our factories started shutting down decades before America's did. All the freezing workers hung up their boots decades ago; they're in Grey Power now, jealously guarding the houses they got back when that wage would go far enough. The only friend I've known to go into the freezing works of Hawke’s Bay has since graduated as an accountant. What's a message of the old-fashioned man providing for his family mean to her?
Filipino women in their care homes and their husbands on the farms of Canterbury aren't hearing Willie. They're hearing from National and they're hearing from ACT, wanting to put their faith in the parties for all the strivers, not the Labour leader who appeals only to the left, Māori, and a “working class” descriptor they don’t identify with. The New Zealand left's stubborn, pigheaded refusal to see working class foreigners as our working class is not a serious policy plan for a nation of immigrants - just a deadweight to be clung onto until it isn’t.
And all the while, from the moment Roastbusters is revived on down, every time Willie tries to jerk right and appeal to the more conservative minded workers, clumsily misusing social media platforms already dominated by ACT and TPM, he only pushes away the new base of the party: all those droves and droves and droves of white collar workers in Wellington and across Auckland. Who are they going to choose as representing their future, the fighter for immigrants and women? Jackson? Or Chlöe Swarbrick? For many, the choice will be obvious. For many more, it will be hard to decide, but I can tell you who’ll find more ways to put you off him during the campaign.
Do I even need to explain again why he won’t work in the Māori seats? It’s push and pull. At the unlikely point at which he wins most of those seats, he’s long since lost the median voter. He’s not Nixon going to China, he’s McGovern. The backlash for a Māori man embracing that kaupapa while trying to win a Westminster Parliament will look like Pākehā hikois from hell.
Willie Jackson loses the 2026 election and it isn’t close. This was probably going to happen anyway. Under Chippy, it’s his quiet duty to the party, he shuffles on, and there’s a good-natured debate between a couple choices on who will unite Labour next. After years of strain under Jackson, and without a working class party hierarchy or caucus to stiffen spines, there’s chaos, the technocrats win not just the leadership but the battle for the soul of the party, and they roll everything he advanced back.
God help us if Willie Jackson clutches up and wins the election. There is no plan for a competent government to make a difference from what we just saw these last six years. Stop this fixation on leaders if you’re actually getting paid to write punditry unlike me. Parties need change and renewal throughout their caucus, and that requires change in local branches and the central hierarchy. I don’t have a master plan up my sleeve to do that but, in fairness, Trotter and Edwards have also taken the “Nixon’s plan to end the Vietnam War” approach to explaining how the fuck Willie Jackson can win a Labour leadership election.
Labour needs to roll the dice as many times as possible on raising engagement and attracting talent. That means they need to appeal to as many New Zealanders as possible. Sure, you can argue for a division of labour (no pun intended) where Labour gets the blue collars and the Greens the whites, but the reality is Labour isn't willing to cede its competitiveness with white collars, nor are the Greens prepared to admit the virtues of moving to the centre and letting Labour go left for them. Thinking about a simultaneous party swap is fun, but it’s about as unserious as Trotter and Edwards’ articles.
I don’t have a plan to engage people more. I’m an amateur political hobbyist. Engage working class people more. Do policy more. Now I’m out of material. What I can tell you, though, is that the fastest way to push people away is a collapse into divisiveness and disunity. Labour have so far avoided that expertly, but they can’t afford any serious talk about leader alternatives unless that alternative is clearly good and ready.
Labour must have somebody for everybody in need. Particularly in these troubled economic times, where they cannot afford giveaways to everybody - nor should they be promising the well-off professional class the moon - that looks, in many cases, like social progressivism: not empty rhetoric and token measures, but magnifying and taking seriously material initiatives on matters like mental health and DV, not to score political points, but to be the best party at improving people’s lives.
The criticism of “something to everybody” is that social-liberal dogma sells out Labour to the technocrats, but the technocrats are not right-wingers indistinguishable from National. National and Labour are reasonably close as parties in many ways, but Labour are never, ever going back to 1987 and Remuera now that they’ve seen what that looks like. This is still a party looking to appeal to everybody from the centre on left, not everybody, period. They got to test the broadest appeal possible under MMP instead of FPP in 2020. We can see from the conversation now around wealth tax that they’ve admitted that doesn’t work.
Appeal across the centre-left starts with working with their allies and accepting wooing some workers across the centre is worth it to lose a few Greens to the left. They’ve got to do the hard yards on policy to show that, if they get in, we won't see a repeat of a government thrust in too soon and unable to accomplish anything. And they should be trialling out different potential future cabinet members, to test their capabilities and to see each of them really reaching out to different strands of the public, to actually show a strong team, because an obsession over the leader can win you elections against the unpopular Luxon, but it won’t make a government a success.
And that - handling Labour's leading portfolios, assigned to appealing to the working class, left, and Māori, and kept with a hundred foot pole from the leadership - is precisely where Willie Jackson belongs.
then again, this was funny
so i guess forget everything i said.
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