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  AGENDA, JULY 2 MIKE WILLIAMS MARK Three separate polls taken in June put National ahead of Labour. The latest NBR poll out yesterday continued the trend giving National a four point lead with the election only 12 weeks away at the most. Parliament is now on four week recess, Labour is using that time to launch it respond to National's much talked about billboard campaign and the first of the government's billboards promotes health and family initiatives such as paid parental leave and cheaper doctor's visits. Labour Party President Mike Williams is here with us now from Wellington. Mike Williams just before we came on the cameraman said 'that guy must be worried about having a heart attack it must have been a shock what's happened over the last week'. Is that true Mike? MIKE No, I'm not near a heart attack if that’s what you asked Mark, but it's kind of predictable in a way, there's been an accumulation of small things plus the budget and of course National Party campaigning very early but what the polls don’t tell you is that we're finding a huge undecided vote out there between 25 and 40% so we're pretty certain that the election is still up for grabs and what we're doing is we're obviously using the recess to get out there and connect with the voters face to face and we're focusing on a theme a week, this week it's health and what we're doing is really focusing on a very successful record by this government. MARK Are you not connecting with them already Mike? MIKE I don’t think so I don’t think we're getting the message through. It's hard to imagine a government that gets defeated that has got the lowest unemployment in the OECD that has actually moved us up the OECD for the first time in 30 years. We have a very stable and successful leadership, we've brought stability to this country after the chaos of the National/New Zealand First coalition and we've got a highly trusted leader, we think we can certainly pull out of this slump and go on to win the election, we're confident. MARK If all of that is right you know you guys should be romping home but you're not, I mean you look at those polls over the last couple of weeks and they show this is a party in trouble. From your point of view did you see this coming or was it a surprise? MIKE Oh it certainly was a surprise, I don’t have the gift of foresight, but what I've noted over the last couple of years is that the electorate seems to grab one issue at a time and there was obviously the Maori issue after the Orewa One speech, there was the tax issue after the budget, now that tends to fade because in elections people do not vote on just one issue, they vote on a whole lot of issues and they vote on things like can a stable political situation continue, which is what Labour's brought. You’ve got a whole lot of National negatives which are yet to come out, I mean I was reminded on the way here that if National had been the government this country would right now be at war. MARK Okay, if people don’t vote on one issue what are the policies that you are gonna take, that your party will take to the country presumably in September that’s gonna win over the voters. MIKE Well the policies are already out there, the policies are stability, good solid leadership, who can you trust I mean we do what we said, you’ve had an amazing series of flip flops by Don Brash starting with the war in Iraq, going on to the fourth week of holidays, the Cullen fund, we'll be emphasising that, that we've been stable, we said what we're going to do. That’s the kind of approach we'll take and we'll take pretty well a positive approach and we'll be also setting out our programme ahead and a lot of things that we are going to do have been buried and forgotten, for example the extension of early childhood education that’s part of our programme not part of the National Party's programme, the extension to Working for Families which is a very significant piece of tax relief that’s largely been forgotten, we'll be focusing on those. MARK Now you say tax relief because part of the whole issue I spose over the polls is the expectations that people had of the budget, and some people blame you for that, they say that you overhyped the expectations there's gonna be tax cuts. Do you take some of that blame? MIKE I do take some of that blame, what I was actually referring to was not tax cuts it was the Kiwi saver which I think is a wonderful initiative for young people getting them into houses, but I think the National Party's in danger of exactly the same thing, I was told by a taxi driver in Christchurch on Wednesday evening that he was gonna vote for Don and when I asked him why he said oh well Don's gonna put 50 dollars a week in my pocket before Christmas, that’s the expectation that’s out there and I note that the National Party's been very slow to release details of their tax policy and I think that’s because it's becoming very very hard to work it out. Now if you look at what happened in Australia in the last month or so Peter Costello brought in a tax cut 26 billion dollars equivalent in New Zealand would be about five billion dollars, that resulted in a six dollar a week increase for somebody in Australia on 58 thousand dollars and an almost immediate rise in interest rates, so that person who got six bucks a week immediately lost about 26 bucks by the mortgage rate going up so I think National's got a great deal of difficulty in putting a sharp point on that policy and we'll be encouraging them to do so over the next little while. You noticed John Key of course very very cagey about detail on the great tax debate on Television New Zealand. MARK But Mike I mean it's not just National, I mean you guys your own polling as we understand tells you that people are expecting at least an extra ten dollars a week in their pocket to make it worthwhile. How are you gonna deliver that? MIKE Well I think we have delivered it in a targeted sense. MARK But people don’t think you have though. MIKE No people don’t think we have and that I think you're getting to the nub of our problem, we have not been out there selling the message and that is what we have to do. Now it's very different because we are obviously the government and we have to govern the country we have to make decisions we have to have cabinet meetings, we have to legislate, but what we have to do now and what I've been saying to our caucus is, you have got to get out to sell, you have got a wonderful record to sell. I brought a graph here this morning which you can see what's happened, employment up, benefit dependency down, crime down, now those are the sort of things we'll be getting out and selling to the people over the next little while. MARK Okay let me show you something, this is the front page of the Herald today. The smacking laws, I mean it's the issues, the pc issues if you like, smackings, unions, prostitution, is there going to be a reaction against that, this is a government that sort of in terms of the social engineering has gone too far? MIKE Well every one of those you’ve named are actually conscience issues and Don Brash voted for the introduction of the Civil Union Bill, he flip flopped on that and voted against it I think in the third reading, but I don’t think that you're gonna see much more of this, but these things are not party political matters they are conscience issues and I think that’s what we've gotta get through. MARK But people associate them with your government though? MIKE They certainly do but you have to have a majority in the parliament for these to get through, and Labour I would remind you Mark is a minority government. MARK But look at John Tamihere, I mean he himself a member of your own party, has seen those issues and said this is where we're exposed, this is what people are sick and tired of, and they are issues that are directly linked to Labour right or wrong. MIKE Well it's wrong and I think we've gotta detach that link and of course John is a law unto himself which is what you have in a broad church party, he's also a very good friend of mine, but I think that we've gotta return to the basic issues and the fundamental issues are what Labour scores well on. We've created more jobs than any other government in history. We have rising indexes in education and in health. These are the things that people ultimately cast their vote on. MARK Are they or do people look and say well hang on National is gonna give me, or they promise they're gonna give me a tax cut, business must be looking at National and thinking well look why not put any money we're gonna dish out for the election we'll give to National because they're gonna give us corporate tax cuts. MIKE Well I'm not having any difficulty raising money from the business community and what I'd point out to you Mark that the five and six years of a Labour government have been five or six years of record profits for business and rising shareholder values and a lot of long sighted businessmen contrast that era with the period of chaos under National during the 90s. MARK Will this be fought on the policies on the record, or will it be fought as a presidential campaign on the leader? I mean how pivotal is Helen Clark to your success? MIKE Oh Helen's absolutely pivotal but the answer to your question is all of the above, you fight on record there'll be a contrasting of Labour in government, the record of Labour in government in the sort of graphs I just showed you. There'll be a contrasting of the two programmes, for example you’ve got a very right wing programme coming out from National in education, they're gonna abolish school zoning which effectively means they're subtracting the right of parents to send their children to the nearest local school, that’s gonna create gridlock in Auckland because 40% of congestion in Auckland is already education related, on top of that they're gonna force bulk funding compulsorily on secondary schools and today we learn they're gonna completely upend the secondary school curriculum. Now that is a radical right wing agenda for education. Your third point was leadership. Yes we do have a huge advantage in leadership, we have stable credible leadership where National's got frankly a rookie. MARK See the issue is after the leadership once you get past Helen Clark where are you guys going, I mean you look at the selection the cabinet's gonna be returned apart from George Hawkins which it's already been signalled he's unlikely to return to cabinet but not looking at any change. Where is the new blood – I mean who is the next generation of Labour Party leaders? MIKE Well I suggest you have a look at our list, we've got some very talented people outside of cabinet, I'm thinking of David Cunliffe etc, Damien O'Connor, we've got some very very talented back benchers and we've got some excellent people coming through on the list, I'm thinking of Shane Jones, hugely successful in Maoridom etc. MARK A first time MP Mike, I mean. MIKE Well Don Brash is a first term MP and so is John Key, I mean their total parliamentary experience Mark is six years. MARK See that raises the other question, I mean when we had that incident over the plane that unfortunate incident of the plane that landed with Helen Clark when the door came off. One of the issues it raised is what would happen – I mean not that we would wish it but what would happen if something happened to Helen Clark, who could step up to the plate, is it a bit thin once you get past there? MIKE No I wouldn’t have said that, I would have said a bit crowded but I'm not gonna start naming successors because that would get me into huge strife with Helen. MARK Okay we've gotta go now Mike, but you’ve got a big lot of work to do between now and the election. MIKE And we're gonna do that work Mark, don’t worry about that. MARK It took three months last time after Orewa, you can do it in time you think? MIKE I think so. MARK Mike Williams, thanks very much for joining us.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- MARK Joining us are our guest commentators Gillian Bradford and Chris Trotter. Chris Trotter for a start what did you make of Mike Williams, is he a worried man? CHRIS TROTTER, Editor of NZ Political Review He certainly gave all the signs of being a rather rattled man. I don’t think holding up graphs is gonna do it somehow. I think what Labour's forgotten is not so much it's core constituency although on the social issues I think they're well out of step with them, but it's the 200,000 odd middle class voters that went off National at the end of the 1990s. Now most of their programme has been aimed at other groups and that middle class constituency I think was looking to the budget for some kind of recognition that they had been faithful followers for six years and it wasn’t forthcoming. MARK But politics these days is all about the centre isn't it, everyone just occupies that centre ground? CHRIS Well they are the centre, that’s middle New Zealand that’s middle class New Zealand. MARK Also how have they missed this, why should this come as a surprise to them? CHRIS Well Labour's always had enormous difficulty dealing with the middle class vote, I mean as a party founded in the trade unions in the working class it's always had a rather disdainful sort of instinct when it comes to approaching middle class voters, but I mean the more thoughtful among them realise that that blue collar constituency isn't large enough to win power with and so they have to have those people on board, they won them over very successfully and they were keeping them on board I thought very successfully right up until in the last you know two or three months, because the turnaround has just been catastrophic for them. GILLIAN BRADFORD, NZ Correspondent, ABC MARK You say Labour, I mean coming from Australia do you recognise this as a Labour party? GILLIAN Oh absolutely because of all the talk on health and education and not giving back the tax cuts I spose that’s what makes it Labour but this Labour government to me is almost like a state Labour government in Australia, it's not focusing on some of the big federal issues and that’s how the Labour Party in Australia can afford to divide itself, you’ve gotta be able to manage the economy at federal level and it's the state governments who talk about health and education at that level- we'll look after your family and that sort of thing, but at the federal level it's the best economic manager that tends to get elected. MARK But Chris it's a Labour party but not as we know it is it? I mean you must be the only person left on the left in this country. CHRIS Oh I think there's one or two brave souls apart from myself, but I think actually this is in terms of the English speaking world at least among the most left wing if we can use that term of the Labour Parties in office, and it's that problem I think which they have failed to come to terms with. That middle class audience I come back to that because it's the crucial swing vote, the fact that they are down in the polls is because that group of people has deserted them and I was astounded frankly, I completely misread the budget, I thought well here's a good traditional budget a fiscally conservative Cullen giving us what he told us he was going to give us and went home to “is that all – is that it – is that the best your Labour Party can do”, and this was multiplied across the country and it was that loyal middle class vote which had been waiting patiently for something from Labour for six years who just felt well they’ve run out of time and we're obviously not going to get anything. MARK But you can't keep boasting these huge multi billion dollars surpluses and then say well you ain't gonna get any of it can you? CHRIS Well I think that was part of the problem and good on the National Party and ACT for constructing the argument in the way they did, I mean the surplus has never been as big as it's been painted but it was certainly big enough I think at the very least to give some movement on the tax brackets as of April 1 next year. MARK Gillian just briefly then, one of the things that set this government out is whenever they have a crisis they deal with it, they cut it off, they shove it out of the road, can they do it on this one? GILLIAN Oh I think Helen Clark appears to be running out of ministers, I mean here's Michael Cullen who she's almost had to get out of the way now over the tax issue, that was one of her most trusted ministers, she's left with herself, so it's gonna be quite different. MARK That immortal phrase only time will tell I suppose.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- MARK The Australian media has been salivating all week over sensational accounts of what went wrong for Labour during and after the election there last November, the accounts come from a new biography of Labour's former leader Mark Latham, it quotes him as describing Labour Premier Bob Carr as “an A grade arsehole” and the current leader Kim Beazley as “a stand for nothing conservative.” The author of the book Bernard Lagan is a former political journalist for the Dominion who for the last 17 years has been covering politics on the other side of the Tasman. Good morning Bernie. BERNIE Good morning Mark. MARK Look I mean you made the shift from here to there, what are the comparisons between labour politics in Australia and Labour politics here? BERNIE I think you could say at this stage the Australian Labour Party has quite a bit to learn from the New Zealand Labour Party. It has things to learn about a degree of unity, it has things to learn about inclusiveness. I mean I'm always struck when I go back to New Zealand and look over from the public galleries these days, look down on the New Zealand parliament and you see a sea of different nationalities and certainly quite a lot of Maori representation. If you look at the Australian parliament it tends to be white middle class and especially if you look at the Labour side it is still very much a Labour insiders' club as to who gets in to the parliament for Labour. MARK Your book paints a picture of the personal eccentricities of the former leader, but it also paints a picture of party in utter chaos. BERNIE Well yes, the leader Mark Latham had some very specific criticisms to make of the Labour Party particularly concerning its structures, for instance Mark was deeply frustrated by Labour's factional system. As Labour Leader he wasn’t able to appoint the people he really wanted into his shadow cabinet, neither could a Labour prime minister do that, he is beholden to the caucus. Mark believed that many of those things had to change and that was one of the reasons why he walked away from politics, he said he saw no prospect that it would change. MARK But Bernie are they valid criticisms or is this an act of revenge from a former leader? BERNIE Oh a bit of both Mark, what I just talked about before is probably a valid criticism, what he had to say about the structures of the party there's a lot of sympathy for that view in the wider Labour Party, the rank and file membership the people who go to the branch meetings you know in the suburbs. I think what he had to say about Kim Beazley was particularly vicious and there's been a lot of bad blood between Latham and Beazley for years, they fell out over policy some time ago, they're very very different people, and I think that you know Mark did have a view that the party needed to become more like the New Zealand Labour Party if you like or the British Labour Party, it needed to find the third way, to tune itself more to a vastly different society that has emerged in both New Zealand Australia and Britain. One of the big changes going on in Australia at the moment is that John Howard has control of the senate and that the first thing he will do will be to pass an equivalent of the New Zealand Employment Contracts Act. MARK Bernie if you look at the New Zealand Labour Party and look at the British Labour Party, one of the things they did in terms of reinventing themselves was cutting those ties with the unions, can the Australian Labour Party afford to do that? BERNIE Well that’s the big 64 dollar question here, yesterday, at least on the television news last night the pictures were of Kim Beazley addressing unionists in Melbourne. Now that group – Australian unionists are an increasingly less relevant part of Australian society so what we have here is the Labour Party talking to less and less of Australia, unless its prepared to reduce it's ties with the union movement. MARK So what does that mean in terms of the party, I mean are they gonna be tempted to say get into single issues politics then? BERNIE Well I think what has to happen is that the party has to somehow reclaim its economic legacy, I mean Gillian Bradford was right when she said earlier that Australians tend to vote Labour governments into power at a state level because they believe that Labour has a better handle on providing essential services such as health, transport, Police services that kind of thing, and as she said the party that gets into office federally is the one who's perceived to be the economic managers. Now the really odd thing is it was the Labour Party under Bob Hawk and Paul Keating who laid the foundations for the very strong performance of the Australian economy over the last 12 or 13 years, I mean they deregulated the banking system, they floated the dollar, but what's happened since 1996 when the Hawk and Keating Labour government finished Labour has almost renounced their legacy, it hasn’t claimed it hasn’t made the claim for the great economic legacy that they left, it's kind of walked away from it. GILLIAN Bernie this is an unprecedented dump on a former leader, what do you think the chances are of the Federal Party recovering under Kim Beazley's leadership in time for the next election? BERNIE No chance at all I don’t think, I think at the very least they'd be looking at a two term strategy, I mean this economy is still going along very very strongly. Labour doesn’t have a viable alternative economic policy at this stage, it's unable to sharpen the differences between it and the coalition on a going policy and I think the view around it is still very much if it's not broken why fix it. MARK And Chris when you listen to the stories of the Australian Labour Party it's like turning the clock back here isn't it, in some ways, with the infighting and factionalism? CHRIS Well I think one of the things that I would take issue with Bernie over is this business of speaking to fewer and fewer Australians. Yes union density has gone down but the number of Australians on middle to low incomes hasn’t gone down and those are the people that Labour has traditionally relied upon to put it into office. The political ground is simply too narrow in the centre for a mass party to continually compete with a traditional conservative political formation for control over and why Labour has fallen back in Australia is because it has in a sense abandoned it's traditional economic radicalism for the sort of third way policies which with Keating in particular represented, so to my mind it wasn’t such a bad strategy to renounce some of the things which that Keating economic rationalist programme did because it hurt a tremendous number of Australians. The Australians that benefited from those reforms why would they vote for an ersatz right wing party when they could have the real thing in John Howard. MARK But isn't it the middle class that every party these days seems to pitch towards? CHRIS Yes well in a sense as I said before in relation to the New Zealand situation they're a swing vote but they're not enough on their own either. MARK Look Bernie one of the things that’s always surprised me about Australian politics is if you look at Labour so woeful in terms of federal politics yet at times they can hold every state government, I mean what is it about the Australian psyche that says we trust you at one level but not at another? BERNIE Well I mean you're quite right, Labour is in power in every state and territory at the moment. I think the reasons for that is that state governments provide the essential services such as health, hospitals, courts, Police, train systems, bus systems all those sort of things, the nuts and bolts of you know how a society runs and people perceive that Labour governments tend to maintain those services, they see them as socially necessary and essential but by and large they haven’t made them user pays so people I think say well we will stick with Labour at a state level because of those services but we don’t trust them yet or at the moment on running the nation's economy. MARK Bernie, I mean you’ve got a party that took a hammering at the election, you’ve got a leader who's taken a hammering thanks to your book and the former leader, you know I mean just where does it go, are we looking at, you're talking maybe not even in a position to win the next election, are they in the wilderness for how long and what do they do to actually rebuild it? BERNIE Well Paul Keating's former speech writer is a highly regarded historian by the name of Don Watson and he wrote in yesterday's Melbourne Age that perhaps Labour is looking at the end game, and his suggestion really was well perhaps Labour isn't going to recover, perhaps in this new era of John Howard having control of the senate once he brings in the equivalent of the New Zealand Employment Contracts Act, unions are likely to wither and I think Don Watson's point was as long as Labour is perceived to be talking mainly to unions and people associated with them then it's in danger of becoming less relevant to the lives of ordinary Australians. MARK Just finally Bernie I mean Mark Latham's gone, Kim Beazley, they’ve seen them before, is there anyone else in the wings who could be the hope of the Australian Labour Party? BERNIE I talked to Kim Beazley about this late last year and he said to me that perhaps the next leader of the Labour Party that is his successor is not even in the parliament. MARK Bernie Lagan thanks very much for joining us live there from Sydney this morning. Transcripts are copyright to Front Page Ltd and may contain errors. They should be checked against a copy of the programme to ensure accuracy. Copyright to Front Page Ltd but may be used PROVIDED attribution is made to TVOne and Agenda |
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