Why Dumping Goff won't help Labour

There is a heightened buzz this week in the Bowen Triangle about prospects of a leadership change in the Labour Party.

The continued poor run in the polls appears to be starting to spook a few within the party.

Election loss by any party triggers a political version of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s cycle of grieving – Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance.

The political version goes something like this: Denial, Self-justification, Debate Core Political Principles, Knife the Leader. After that point you get a mix of another round of Self Justification, Denial, and Knife the Leader again, depending on where the polls are moving.

Labour has only in the past month ventured into debating core political principles – which is almost always a preliminary to a leadership spill.

Finance spokesman David Cunliffe’s has been the main proponent, in two separate speeches: one which suggested a more left-Green-ward tilt in economic policy, and another proposing Labour should allow more private investment in state-owned enterprises, although somehow doing this in a way which would not dilute the government’s ownership.

Coherence, or simply making sense, are not strong features of these debates and Mr Cunliffe efforts are no exception.

Mr Cunliffe’s certainly do not make much sense – unless you realise they were about positioning for the party leadership rather than principle or – god forbid - policy

But changing the leader won’t fix Labour’s core problem, which is this - it has too many people in the House whose main life experiences, and in many cases their emotional development, is solely concerned with the Labour Party.

Mr Goff himself is one example, of course – he did the university, student politico, Young Labour, MP route while still in his 20s. His brief period outside Parliament after he lost Roskill in 1990 saw him teaching politics at an Auckland tertiary institution.

By a rough count, 16 of the first 20 in Labour’s parliamentary line up have gone a similar student pol and/or union official; Labour Party official; MP route, with several adding the extra step of a stint working in the office of a Labour MP or minister.

The exceptions are Mr Cunliffe, David Parker, Shane Jones, and a couple of part-exceptions in the cases of Clayton Cosgrove and Moana Mackey, both of whom did other things (business and PR consultant and scientist for Mobil and ESR respectively) while maintaining a high degree of involvement in Labour from their teenage years.

If you look at the profiles of people currently – to use an inelegant phrase from US politics – rat-f***ing each other to get selection for the 2011 election they again are dominated by people with the same sort of fairly narrow life experiences.

And that is Labour’s problem. Not that its talent pool has people who have gone the student politics/union official; party official; candidate/MP route. It would be strange if there were not a fair proportion with this background.

The problem is there are so many of them.

The odd thing is that this has not been addressed. Given the academic profiles of most of Labour’s caucus, many of them would have come across the psychological term “group think” and its dangers to any organisation.

It is one reason Labour is continually preaching to the choir (the other being a product of the ‘denial’ phase mentioned above).

Most organisations have a certain bias in the sort of people they attract. Like will always attract like. The trick is to make sure this does not become so self-reinforcing that a kind of inward-looking vortex develops and an organisation’s only reference points are its internal ones.

That takes over policy direction. Many of Labour’s flagship policies in office, especially after 2004, seemed designed less at solving any actual real-world problems and more designed at making New Zealand more Labour-friendly. Interest-free student loans and Working for Families were the best examples of this.

The aim appeared to be to make the majority of New Zealanders dependent on the state. The overall goal wasn’t actually making things better for people or (heaven forbid) allow people to make things better for themselves.

The goal was to make New Zealand save for the Labour Party. It didn’t work – people aren’t fools. But (and this is the subject of a whole different column) it was successful enough for Prime Minister John Key to declare large areas of government spending ‘no go’ areas for any change.

National has had a very different, but not insignificant, talent problem, and from early last decade took steps to overcome it.

The goal was to attract highly talented people with backgrounds in the real world. Emphasis was on brains, presentability, and –despite the fervent wishes/fears of many on the left – not a lot of ideology.

The first election saw one dud and one star (Brian Connell and John Key) but the subsequent 2005 and 2008 elections saw intakes of stellar quality.

Labour’s intake in 2008 was actually quite good. It could have been more broadly based - its best MP, Grant Robertson, has trod the usual student pol/party official etc path, with a stint in Helen Clark’s office, but appears to have a broader perspective (as did Miss Clark herself, early on).

But as a group, the 2008 intake are a reasonably talented group of people who have trod the student pol/union official/party official/minister’s gopher route before getting selected for a seat.

But there is still the need for a broader talent pool. Labour’s boast – one echoed by some political commentators – is that it looks more like New Zealand than National does.

But that is only at superficial level. Where it actually matters, it is only true if most of New Zealanders have done very little in their lives except politics.

Which – praise be – is very far from the truth.