BY JACK BERHOFF
AUCKLAND The new New Zealand parliament is now sworn in and the Labour-Progressive minority coalition government headed by Prime Minister Helen Clark has delivered its "speech from the throne" sketching out its three-year policy agenda.
This Labour-Progressive minority coalition government was formed after the July 27 election resulted in no party gaining an absolute majority in the 120-seat, single-chamber parliament.
Under New Zealand's proportional electoral system a party's parliamentary representation is proportional to its party votes once they pass a 5% threshold or win a constituency seat. With 52 MPs, Labour is reliant on the support of former Alliance leader Jim Anderton's Progressive Coalition (two MPs) and the eight MPs of the "family values" United Future party to remain in government.
The Progressive Coalition is a right-wing split from the Alliance. Anderton has remained minister of economic development. The remainder of the Alliance, led by Laila Harre, failed to receive enough votes to receive a seat in parliament.
The deal that Labour and United Future have struck is not a full coalition deal, in which the smaller party gets seats in cabinet, but a lesser "confidence and supply" deal. This means that the government gets the numbers in parliament to pass its budgets while United Future gets specific policy measures advanced and consultation on most matters.
United Future's specific policy gains are a Commission for the Family (to promote and assist two-parent families), victims' rights legislation and private toll roads. In addition, Labour has agreed to introduce no legislation to decriminalise marijuana.
These policies are in line with United Future's overall policy position which is strictly neo-liberal on economic matters more power to the private sector and morally reactionary on social matters it blames dope and single-parent families for many of society's ills.
The July 27 election was marked by the worst ever result for the National party, the main conservative party, after a lacklustre campaign.
ACT, the ultra-free market party, retained the nine seats it held before the election and New Zealand First, a xenophobic anti-immigration party, increased its representation from five to 13 MPs.
With Labour certain of victory many National supporters went looking for other options to prevent the Greens from having the balance of power.
The election came after nearly three years of Labour-Alliance minority coalition government with support from the Greens on confidence and supply. This government introduced some progressive reforms, for example, the ceasing of native forest logging on state-owned land, the renationalisation of the universal no-fault accident compensation system (ACC), a small increase in the minimum wage, the introduction of 12 weeks paid parental leave, the reintroduction of income-related rents in state housing, the replacement of anti-worker industrial relations legislation with a more union-friendly act. A state-owned bank has also been re-established.
@BODYSPACE = However, there was little progress on Treaty of Waitangi settlements, the Reserve Bank Act remained unchanged, the government was aggressively pro-"free trade" (with a free trade deal signed with Singapore), NZ troops were committed to the war in Afghanistan and the cuts made to welfare benefits in the 1990s were not reversed.
The Alliance seldom spoke out against Labour's conservatism. Some of the Alliance's ministers fought as best they could, but they did so behind the closed doors of the cabinet room. Labour and Anderton insisted that public differences were to be kept to an absolute minimum. This meant that the Alliance was unable to tell the public about what was going on, let alone mobilise public support for its positions. Unsurprisingly, support for the Alliance declined over the course of the government.
Strongly determining the Alliance's orientation was Anderton's old-style Labourist politics the paternalistic state that protects people economically and morally. Within the Alliance he was a domineering figure who could brook no opposition. This meant that only the left that could work under Anderton survived in the Alliance.
When the war with Afghanistan became the touchstone for all those Alliance activists concerned about the conservative direction of the coalition government, Anderton could not tolerate criticism of his politics. After he and his supporters split away, the remaining Alliance leaders failed to publicly clarify what the political differences between them and Anderton were, and were unable to rebuild the organisation and its tarnished image.
The result is that the new Labour-Progressive minority coalition government is more right-wing than the 1999-2002 Labour-Alliance minority coalition government. The new government's agenda has few new policy initiatives and there is little prospect of progressive advance beyond the little achieved by Labour in its previous term.
This now leaves the Greens as the only progressive party with parliamentary representation. The Greens have taken a consistent stand against corporate globalisation. They stood alone in opposing troops being sent to Afghanistan and they refused to be part of, or even provide confidence and supply to, a government that would allow full-scale release of genetically modified plants and animals.
However, the danger for the Greens is that their parliamentary leadership appears to have little strategy beyond getting into coalition government with Labour and the party has little control its parliamentary caucus.
From Green Left Weekly, September 18, 2002.
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