The eyes of the world may be transfixed by the spectacle of the race for the White House, but there’s another election in November that deserves some attention. New Zealand is going to the polls.
There are a few similarities with Britain: Labour has been in office for long time, and there is widespread disillusionment; National (the Tories) has a new, young leader aggressively pursuing the political centre ground…
But there are differences too: most unions are not affiliated to NZ Labour, and the voting system, Mixed Member Proportional Representation (MMP) means that small parties can end up holding the balance of power. One such party is the Maori Party, formed by a split from Labour after a dispute over indigenous rights to the foreshore and seabed. The Maori party has indicated that it would be willing to form a government with either Labour or National, depending on the circumstances. The Greens have made similar noises.
There have been a few recent developments on the left. The Alliance continues to plod along, a left wing split from Labour, now a shadow of its former self since its former president jumped ship back to Labour. It now faces competition from two newly registered parties: RAM and the Workers’ Party.
Residents’ Action Movement is largely the initiative of Socialist Worker, who flew in George Galloway last year to help fight the practically non-existent problem of Islamophobia in New Zealand. The increasingly reformist trajectory of SW resulted in a number of their younger comrades in Auckland splitting to the left to form Socialist Aotearoa.
The Workers’ Party is the product of the merger of two small groups that describe their political background variously as “pro-Mao” and “pro-Trotsky”. “Workers should be running the country” is the party’s slogan for this election, and key policies include open borders and NZ troops out of Afghanistan. The WP has had some recent successes: last year, the west Auckland mayoral election candidate won 2101 votes standing on a hard left platform; and another young member played a leading role in the Wellington bus drivers’ strike/ lockout, having just won presidency of the union.
With lower “barriers to entry” for minor parties, the New Zealand elections could prove more interesting than some other “two horse races”.
Comments
Galloway
"who flew in George Galloway last year to help fight the practically non-existent problem of Islamophobia in New Zealand"
Comments like that benefit nobody - least of all the author. And anyway, if even only a few people, who had been the victim of such bigotry, felt a bit better about themselves or their futures, then the visit was worthy. But those people are 'practically non-existent', so who cares eh?
The fact is that there had been a visit by some Australian baptist maniac just prior to Galloway's visit and his visit was to balance out the effect of that. But why let facts get in the way of you being snide?
A question of political priorities
Faceless, I am sorry you have chosen take offence on behalf of NZ Muslims. The implicit criticism in my choice of words was of how RAM/SW decided their political priorities. Rather than taking NZ realities as a starting point, they looked to the Respect/SWP "mothership" in London. Anti-Muslim prejudice is a serious problem in Britain. The gutter press whip it up daily over there. Not so in NZ.
Asian people here face real discrimination, but not on the basis of Islam (far more Asians are Buddhist, Hindu or Christian than Muslim) It is fundamentally a problem of racism, and a campaign for open borders is the sharpest way to confront this. Last year, one of the major campaigns of the left in Auckland was to free a number of Iranians detained at Mt Eden remand centre under threat of deportation. They were not Muslims, but Christian converts.
The Results
The preliminary results are available at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Zealand_general_election,_2008
As expected, National was the largest party and is currently speaking to coalition partners. A deal with the Maori party may counterbalance the neo-liberal fanatics of ACT. Labour vote collapsed, with turnout down in many working class electorates.
Of the extra parliamentary parties, the Alliance was barely able to increase its share of the party vote since 2005. The Workers Party polled 824 party votes, respectable enough considering it was the last of the parties to be registered, giving activists just 5 weeks to campaign for the party list vote. RAM got less than half of WP's vote, which must be a big disappointment to their activists who were predicting a "tsunami" of grassroots resistance behind their platform. In all likelihood they would have got a bigger vote standing as Socialist Worker rather than aiming low for a watered down populism.