KiwiTL: A Very Substantial Opportunity
- Thread starter Uhura's Mazda
- Start date
1993, it was a very close election and I think Levine's what if series had Moore win it.
Uhura's Mazda
Banned
Chapter Two: The Liberal
I continued my association with the NewLabour Party for a couple of years after that night, but my membership became less keen with each annual renewal. The Party claimed 6,000 members, only 2,000 of whom seemed to pay their fees, and only a few hundred of whom ever turned out to campaign. Most of them were ex-Labour, and a decent proportion were of the Social Liberal wing which had been resented by the majority faction from the beginning. Only two things united the factions: hatred of what the Labour Party had become, and hatred of the tinpot Trotskyist sects who tried to infiltrate the NLP from time to time. Sue Bradford had been ejected from the Party before I even joined.
I would have stayed on if the leadership had been able to think strategically. It was obvious, now that MMP had failed so resoundingly, that the best way of maximising our chances in our few favourable electorates was to convince other minor parties to stand aside for us. Some voices had proposed electoral alliances from the start, and indeed we had entered into one with Mana Motuhake in 1990 which had ensured the election of Jim Anderton of the NLP and Matiu Rata of Mana Motuhake, but Jim’s personal disagreements with Matt had soured the idea of bringing the Greens and others on board.
Matt McCarten, the Party President, was a reasonable, if brusque, man, and I managed to get him alone at one point to badger him about an inter-party alliance. “Surely we could benefit from a pooling of resources and a system of electorate pacts?”
“Look, mate,” he said, “we can’t gain a thing from the minnows. The Democrats aren’t a going concern, all they’re good for is cups of tea and whist drives. Mana Motuhake consists of no more than five Maori blokes, and as for the Greens…”
“They did beat us in 1990, Matt.”
“Fluke. We had much the stronger environmental message, all they had was the word ‘Green’.”
“It worked, didn’t it?”
“It won’t get them into Parliament without electoral reform - Laila went along to one of their meetings recently, and it was just right-wing spaceheads talking about forcing delinquent teens into eco-friendly slave labour. They wouldn’t work with us and we wouldn’t want them to. And they only have about fifty members.”
“But convincing them to stand aside for us could be the difference between victory and defeat in a close race!”
“And you think Green voters are going to vote for a centre-left party on the say-so of a Party Leader they probably haven’t even heard of?” In point of fact, the Greens didn’t have a leadership until a few years later.
“Do you have any better ideas of how to win a second seat?”
And that was basically the end of it. Both the discussion and my (already limited) dedication to the NLP. But after a few months of political inaction, which was largely taken up with trying to make women have consensual sex with me, the bug got me again.
The National Party had, in its own way, been just as divided as the Labour Party during the 1980s and 1990s. It too had made the transition from Muldoonist statism (or rather, civil servicism) to full-on Ruthanasia. This was a reference to Ruth Richardson, then the Minister of Finance in the Fourth National Government, who had taken the perilous economic situation left to her by Labour and concluded that the only practical thing to do would be to sell off the entire welfare state, which had been left relatively untouched by Roger Douglas thanks to David Lange’s sentimental attachment to it. People voted National in 1990 in desperation to end the neoliberal revolution, and what they got was the final, murderous wave of hospital closures and privatisations to the lowest bidder.
The National caucus in 1990 was huge, 67-strong, and as well as the surviving supporters of Muldoon who had not been bribed away by Jim Bolger (then the Prime Minister) and Ruth Richardson - including Muldoon himself - there was also a cohort of new entrants of the class of ‘90 who had signed up to stand in no-hope electorates and won, and who then turned out not to be particularly attuned to the ideological direction of the leadership of the Party. These men turned to experienced Rob’s Mob ally Winston Peters for leadership within National.
But the Maori Affairs Minister was not to stay inside the tent for long. For one thing, his frequent public diatribes about how terrible the Treaty of Waitangi was did not mesh well with what his colleagues were saying - and Cabinet collective responsibility is pretty key in a Westminster system. He was ejected from Cabinet in the summer of 1991 and from the National caucus in August 1992 by a vote of 50-12. Hot takes from the media called Winston a centrist Anderton, and rumour was rife that he was about to start a ‘NewNational Party’.
The rumour-mongers were wrong, as they usually are. For one thing, Winston did not fancy the prospect of sitting as an embittered pariah alongside Jim and Rata, and for another, the NewNational Party had already been founded.
Among the aforementioned Class of ‘90 were Gilbert Myles and Hamish MacIntyre. Neither could be described as a political entity in any way, but they were the most extreme centrists of the National caucus in the early days of the Fourth National Government, and went off together to sit as Independents in 1991. The following year, they launched the Liberal Party, harking back to that great progressive party that was subsumed ignominiously into National in the wake of the Great Depression. The new Liberal Party did not make a splash at all, and I only heard of it when Winston Peters joined.
Winston had been polled consistently as New Zealand’s preferred Prime Minister, and 31% said they would vote for a hypothetical ‘Peters Party’. Now, to all intents and purposes, they had one. It did not actually exist in any organisational sense, but it now had three MPs, which was the largest third party caucus since the 1930s. Despite the arguments from some quarters that Peters should have gone alone instead of following the no-hopers Myles and MacIntyre, none could deny that a frisson was in the air. Even in the Sydenham electorate, where I still lived at that point, I was meeting people who were proud to call themselves Liberals. So I did what I had always done, and went with the flow.
I joined the Liberal Party in November 1992, a couple of months after Peters’ defection. It had been expected that a few more would follow him (such as Peter McCardle, Cam Campion, Ian Peters, etc.) but none did - they were mostly first-termers, and saw more personal profit in staying with National than in taking a chance on a new vehicle. Although, to be fair, if it was a vehicle it would be a rusty old British Leyland import. In fact, within a few months, the vast majority of the active membership were disaffected members of the Social Liberal wing of the NLP.
We would meet our first test run in the April of 1993: Winston decided at this point to resign his seat and contest the by-election as a Liberal, in order to shore up our flagging poll ratings with a bit of media attention and demonstrate that the party was a force to be reckoned with. The other two were going to join him in this venture, but were thankfully dissuaded. Two by-election losses on the same day would really take the wind out of Winston’s sails.
Having lived in Christchurch for more than long enough, and amassed enough savings to live off for a month or so, I quite calmly quit my job at the Canterbury Museum and bussed up to Tauranga, a city I had never so much as visited before, to campaign in the by-election. The relatives again made their displeasure known. I rented a room in Gate Pa and offered my services simultaneously to a local branch of Bunnings and to what passed for Peters’ campaign team. There were about three of them. We did what we could, and I was the only one who knocked on doors with any regularity, but it hardly mattered what we did or didn’t do. I’d thought that Jim Anderton was a ludicrously popular person in his own stomping ground, but Winston had him beaten into a cocked hat. They loved him there. If Winston had declared the place his own independent fiefdom, they’d have died for him.
We were helped, admittedly, by the fact that National and Labour had resolved not to dignify this naked stunt by standing candidates, which suited us down to the ground. “Peters Hangs On In Tight Three-Way Race” was not our idea of an optimum headline. But the rest of the parties stood, even the Natural Law lot, a bizarre outfit who wanted to unite the world in tantric meditation. This made it more of a fight, since the NewLabour Party did a bit of campaigning, as did the Greens, to their credit.
I’d enrolled myself in Tauranga back when it appeared that we would need every vote against National, so I went down to vote on election day before going to an ordinary day’s work. I crossed off all the opposing candidates (it has been technically legal to vote with a single tick if you choose since Winston’s own electoral petition was granted in 1978, getting him into Parliament, but you never know whether the Returning Officer has paid any attention to the law or not) and left just Winston’s name, and that was that. A few dozen random people were gotten hold of by somebody to make it seem as if we were a mass movement when the cameras turned up to our election night party, and they were plied with alcohol until they would cheer for anything. It didn’t take long to count the votes; the turnout was a disappointing 49%. Within a couple of hours, Winston had been elected once more in Tauranga, only this time for the Liberal Party. For a brief evening, the two-party duopoly was doomed.
Uhura's Mazda
Banned
He came close in 1993 IOTL, it was only special votes which ensured Bolger's majority. Ironically, NewLabour also heavily implied that they'd support the National Government during the period of uncertainty there.
FYI, the 31% poll result is straight from OTL.
This looks like it has the potential to shake things up a little bit, but at the same time you seem to imply it's going to go horribly wrong soon...
Great update! I like the main character, you do a good job of showing that most people, even some who are actually involved in politics, aren't really driven by ideological concerns at all.
Also, because I know you're just waiting for me to post this:
Great update! I like the main character, you do a good job of showing that most people, even some who are actually involved in politics, aren't really driven by ideological concerns at all.
Also, because I know you're just waiting for me to post this:
Uhura's Mazda
Banned
He has some opinions, but he isn't particularly ideological - if he were, this would be a very long TL about lots of failed campaigns for the NewLabour Party.
Thank you very much for posting the picture at an opportune time. In summary, because there's no Alliance, there's still some populist room for a centrist party like the Liberals without going Right on social issues - and because Peters has always been about going for the most populist campaign, him joining the Liberals (which was discussed IOTL - there were even some serious talks about him being given the leadership of the Alliance) is a natural progression.
Uhura's Mazda
Banned
Chapter Three: A Baptism of Fire in Northern Maori
In advance of the 1993 general election, the Liberal Party did its best to maximise its chances of winning more than just Tauranga. We needed a caucus, otherwise Winston would be no better than an Independent - this was the lesson which had been lost on NewLabour after the 1990 election. Tauiwi (i.e. 'non-Maori') campaigners were directed to the electorates of our founding MPs, Gilbert Myles in Roskill and Hamish MacIntyre in the Manawatu - neither had bedded in to any great extent, and both had been hurt by boundary changes which took in more Labour-voting areas, so we didn’t hold out much hope. Especially after Gilbert made some very rude jokes about the Rotary Club in Roskill, right to their very faces.
The polling, such as it was, showed that we could not expect more than about 20%, but our figures for Maori voters were much stronger - for Winston had wisely shut up about his desire to abolish the Treaty of Waitangi, and had subsequently attracted a lot of Maori whose sole reason for supporting him was that he was the only Maori party leader in the country. That counted for a lot, even in those days. So Winston’s big idea for 1993 was to work the Maori electorates, and as I was part-Ngapuhi and my parents were letting me use their bach up in Onerahi, I volunteered to be campaign manager for our candidate in Northern Maori.
My first task in this position was to find a candidate for Northern Maori.
For readers unaccustomed to Maori-roll politics (which is a different kettle of fish from Maori politics as a whole in some ways) it is basically all about mana. Mana is a bit like honour, and a bit like personal power. Tribal and interpersonal relations are all about mana, and in terms of elections, the candidate with the most mana usually wins. Ideology and policy are less relevant than who you are related to and who you owe respect to. As such, I did not need to learn our first Manifesto off by heart, but I did need to learn the whakapapa - genealogy - of our chosen candidate.
For the last three years, the MP in Northern Maori, which covered the whole of Northland, Rodney and most of Waitakere City, right up to the Auckland isthmus, had been Matiu Rata. Matt had first won the seat for Labour in 1963 and risen to Minister of Maori Affairs in the Third Labour Government, but in the late 1970s he became disaffected with Labour’s Maori policies and started his own party, Mana Motuhake. He exited Parliament in 1980 but kept up the good fight, re-entering ten years later after making an electoral pact with NewLabour - the first time a Maori seat had been lost by Labour in decades. But over the latest Parliamentary term, his relations with Jim Anderton, who was retreating more and more into his own social circle of working class Pakeha, suffered, and in mid-1993 the NLP announced that they would put up their own candidate against Matt Rata.
A Ngapuhi named Tau Henare had suddenly decided that he wanted to be an MP, and approached Jim with a proposal to unseat Rata - it was uncertain whether Rata would be able to win the seat a second time, so Henare was determined to pounce at that point. He was the grandson of a Maori MP for the National Party, and the great-nephew of Sir James Henare, commander of the Maori Battalion. He had much ancestral mana and had spent his youth travelling from marae to marae and from hui to hui. In short, he was in no way ideologically aligned to the NewLabour Party - in fact, we stood his brother-in-law Tuku Morgan in Western Maori that year.
National, never particularly popular in Maori electorates, did not want to get into the inevitably messy fight in Northern Maori, which should have made us the most conservative option. But Maori-roll politics is different, and Labour picked Dover Samuels, who like Matt Rata is - or was - a major figure in the Ratana Church and was the most Establishment figure on the ballot paper.
I was actually struggling to find a candidate with sufficiently high status to make a fair game of it, when Titewhai Harawira came into my life. I was attending a hui at the Waitangi marae, and had mentioned to some people how desperate I was to find somebody willing to take advantage of the huge Liberal vote which was as yet untapped, when a wiry lady of indeterminate age came up to me.
“They’re all dickheads” she said.
“Who?”
“Politicians. They come here every year on the 6th of February, and they never do a bloody thing for the tangata whenua. Your Winston is a good man, though.”
As I was getting increasingly desperate a couple of months ahead of election day, I offered her the candidacy there and then. She is to this dsy an important figure in Maoridom, and a tireless campaigner for Maori rights. She is also quite left-wing, which was a problem for us during debates in 1993. I did my best to explain to her that the Liberal Party was a centrist party which wanted to protect local industry, stop the sell-offs of state assets, and generally enable people to get on with life, but when faced with a crowd, she inevitably went on rants about how the Government ought to spend 50% of its budget on Treaty claims and helping Maori, and how anyone who disagreed was a “gutless fish” or a “race traitor”. Her sharp tongue gained her more fans than we would otherwise have had, though, and her speeches gained more and more listeners as the campaign went on.
She had to pay up for libel when she accused Labour’s Dover Samuels of being a rapist, of course, but we won’t go into that.
Campaigning in Maori electorates is very different to what I was used to - you simply can’t canvass door-to-door outside of specific neighbourhoods, because you would be walking for half an hour to find five doors with residents on the Maori roll, even in the provincial towns. You just have to get the community leaders on your side and visit every marae you can find. We didn’t even do any roadside signs, although Samuels did. And even in Northern Maori, where the Maori population was densest, it was nearly a day’s drive from Cape Reinga to Titirangi. As such, there wasn’t a lot I could do, with my quarter-Ngapuhi blood, to help Titewhai. I generally just argued with her and drove her around with our election material in the back seat of the old postie van I’d bought and painted a decal onto with Party funds. As far as electioneering went, though, she was her own boss, and I just let her get on with it. As long as we had two MPs, it didn’t matter who won where.
Election night took place in Terenga Paraoa Marae, where somebody had set up a small television set in the corner and - in what was rapidly becoming Liberal Party custom - rounded up a few locals to fill out the crowd. There were women and children from across the Maori community of Whangarei there, which made the occasion slightly different from the male-dominated election nights I’d been to before.
Nobody knew what the outcome was going to be - National and Labour had made themselves equally unpopular, and the number of votes going to various minor parties could not be modelled on an electorate-by-electorate basis, so there was genuine tension in the air. As it happened, Jim Anderton romped home again in Sydenham, but the NLP performed poorly again on a national level - beaten again by the Greens, who were still rather short of electorates where they stood a genuine chance of winning. The Democrats were once more short of the full 99 candidates, and those that stood shouldn’t have wasted their time. They were beaten by the Christian Heritage Party, who won around 2% of the national vote - which was very good for a party that 99.9% of the population had never heard of.
But we Liberals did not do very well at all. Although we took home a commendable 7%, and stood candidates in every electorate, this was a far cry from the 20% or more that we had been talking about only months before and the 31% that was being bandied about when I joined. It seemed that New Zealanders would love Winston Peters as Prime Minister, as long as they didn’t have to vote for his Party. He still won Tauranga, of course, with 55% of the vote against a full spectrum of opponents, but Myles came third with 18% in Roskill and MacIntyre equalled his position in Manawatu with a creditable 28%. If we had actually existed as an organisation, we would have had a real chance of holding Manawatu against the evenly-split major parties.
But in the Maori electorates, all was disappointment. Although we beat Mana Motuhake in the Western and Southern electorates, and in the Maori roll as a whole, Titewhai came last in a sickeningly close race in Northern Maori. I was, despite myself, glad to see Matt Rata go - he was past it, really, and never hugely co-operative - but Dover Samuels’ victory was not welcomed. It seemed that my talk of mana and whakapapa had been proven wrong, and Maori roll voters had simply returned to their natural home in Labour. As it happened, of course, I was just a decade early.
That 1993 election was the last real flurry of activity in Mana Motuhake - which had never been a particularly active party, truth be told. They stood, that year, not only in the Maori electorates, but also in quite a few of the general seats, winning a respectable number of votes in some. But Matt Rata was an exhausted man by that point, and although he remained Leader for over a decade after that, the momentum he had tried to build in 1990 had been replaced with an ebb tide. Despite the increased attention being given to Maori issues in the late 1990s and the 2000s, Mana Motuhake did not turn out to be the party to shape the narrative, and for the rest of its existence, Mana Motuhake presented little more than paper candidacies.
On a national level, Mike Moore’s Labour Party failed again to beat the Tories, although it did gain 18 seats (including those of Myles and MacIntyre) to reach 46, five fewer than National. They lost the popular vote by less than one percentage point, harmed more by the Greens and the NLP than the National Party was by the Democrats, Liberals, and Christians. And their problem was that the Moore-Clark process of returning to the progressive centre-left was muddled and belied by the fact that so many of the caucus were still in cahoots with Roger Douglas’ Association of Consumers and Taxpayers. Not least Richard Prebble. Nobody was entirely sure that they could trust Labour at that point, and when they did, it was only because National had made themselves even more objectionable.
Alex Richards
Donor
It all seems rather up in the air at the moment- a sense that something will happen, but what?
