Is a Left-Wing Leadership of the NZ Labour Party Possible?

Activists inside centre-left parties overseas have tried to challenge neoliberalism by getting socialist leaders elected such as Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders. Could this happen within NZ Labour?

This essay was originally published on the System Change Aotearoa website on 16 August 2024. I am publishing an updated version as part of a series exploring the need for a socialist party in Aotearoa.

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It is a painful experience, to have fought long and hard for something you knew was inadequate and to have even that taken away.

This whiplash is being felt by activists across Aotearoa, some of whom have spent years and others decades fighting for climate action, workers’ rights, livable incomes for all, access to decent housing, and for Te Tiriti o Waitangi to be honoured. Campaigners spent years organising and marching for a fair and sustainable future, were given crumbs by the last Labour Government, and are now watching aghast as the new government tears up the minimal progress that was made in the previous six years whilst advancing their own right-wing agenda at a breakneck speed.

The Labour Party has long urged activists to be ‘realistic,’ arguing that only incremental change is possible; that it is impossible to transform Aotearoa overnight, that the voting public will never accept radical reform, and that three year terms and the MMP electoral system force parties to be moderate and tack to the ‘centre ground.’ National, ACT and NZ First have sent these arguments up in smoke.

The Coalition is taking a scorched earth approach to reform. As soon as the government was formed, the three parties launched an aggressive 100 day agenda, using parliamentary urgency an unprecedented number of times to roll back a number of key Labour reforms. High on the list of axed policies were Fair Pay Agreements — the key workplace reform which private sector unions had spent nearly all of Labour’s two terms awaiting — and the ban on new offshore oil and gas drilling projects, a pivotal demand of the climate movement. Nicola Willis is cutting the public service to the bone, embarking on an austerity programme the likes of which Aotearoa has not experienced since the early 1990s.

The government’s campaign against Te Tiriti o Waitangi threatens to send us back decades on the hard-fought rights won by Māori through relentless struggle. The Treaty Principles Bill is vile; but while both National and NZ First intend to vote down ACT’s most extreme policy at second reading, the Coalition is in the midst of unleashing a series of other racist policies. Benefit sanctions and ‘tough on crime’ policies such as the gang patch law will hit Māori harder than any other group; and the Fast Track Bill constitutes a real and present danger to both the Treaty and the planet.

Workers’ rights, indigenous rights and environmental protections are being bulldozed in front of our eyes, all in service of insatiable corporate greed.

A Labour Party in Crisis

The First Labour Government, elected in 1935 and led by Michael Joseph Savage and Peter Fraser, knew how to use three-year terms to deliver transformational change to benefit working people. The Fourth Labour Government (1984-1990) also unleashed radical change, but in the opposite direction; forty years ago, Finance Minister Roger Douglas rolled back the welfare state established by his predecessors. Douglas famously spoke of moving in “quantum leaps” to keep opponents distracted and confused, unable to fight against his uncompromising agenda. This Coalition knows it too — the three right-wing parties know that even if their government only lasts for one-term, moving at speed and scale means they will achieve more than the Ardern-Hipkins government did in two terms, and perhaps even more than the Clark and Key-English governments achieved in three.

Jacinda Ardern in her five years as Prime Minister led a centrist government which failed to deliver the transformational change she had promised in 2017. When Ardern resigned in January 2023, Chris Hipkins took over and swiftly moved the party even further toward the ‘centre,’ ditching a series of reforms and refusing to implement taxes on wealth or capital gains — despite the fact that taxing the rich is popular with voters. At the precise time that the government needed to shift to the left and deliver radical reform in the interests of its working class voter base who were struggling during an acute cost of living crisis, Labour instead moved right.

The government went down in flames as a result. Hipkins led Labour to its second-worst election defeat since the 1920s, recording the biggest fall in vote share that either major party has ever experienced.

The fact that Hipkins remains leader of the Opposition is a clear sign that the Labour Party does not intend to change direction. We cannot tolerate this; left-wing activists in Aotearoa must not settle for another incrementalist centre-left government which fails to bring about fundamental change in the wake of the bonfire of progressive policies we are currently witnessing. In the midst of a climate crisis, a housing crisis, a crisis of inequality and an all-out assault on Te Tiriti, transformational change is not merely desirable — it is urgently necessary, moreso than ever before.

The incrementalist politics of Hipkins, Ardern and their predecessor Helen Clark is part of a broader trend within western centre-left parties, which have adhered to an ideology known as the ‘Third Way’ since the 1990s. Third Way ideology was formulated around the agendas of US Democratic Party President Bill Clinton and UK Labour leader Tony Blair, leaders who sought to adapt their parties to the free market revolution of the previous decade rather than overturn it. Clinton and Blair left the low-tax, low-spend, heavily privatised neoliberal economic model imposed in the 1980s by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in place. Third Way parties offered mild tweaks within the framework of neoliberalism, upholding the belief that the wealth would “trickle down,” — while in reality allowing the rich to get richer and richer.

Third Way politics has been hegemonic within the New Zealand Labour Party (NZLP) since Clark became leader in 1993. The NZLP’s turn towards the Third Way was actually a leftward shift, given that between 1984 and 1993 the party had been captured by hardline neoliberals who imposed free market ideology on the country as zealously as Reagan and Thatcher had done in the US and UK. The Third Way turn was however, here as overseas, a marked shift away from the redistributive politics that had dominated the postwar era.

The 2008 Global Financial Crisis and the austerity that followed discredited the neoliberal economic model in the eyes of many. In the years since, social movements in many countries have attempted to capture the leaderships of centre-left parties in order to force them to adopt transformative politics. Activists have demanded that social democratic parties abandon neoliberalism and austerity, and side with workers instead of the corporate interests that these parties have served for far too long. In response, incumbent Third Way politicians have proven themselves to be fiercely resistant to any real change.

Could this phenomenon occur within the NZ Labour Party? Austerity and increased social and political polarisation have arrived upon the shores of Aotearoa, mirroring what happened across Europe and America in the 2010s. Is now the moment for left-wing activists to attempt to take back the Labour Party, in order to return it to its founding purpose of representing the interests of the working class?

The Corbyn Movement — Could It Happen Here?

The most famous examples of this phenomenon in the English-speaking world were the Bernie Sanders campaigns of 2016 and 2020. Sanders sought to win the Democratic Party nomination on a platform which included taxing and regulating Wall Street, doubling the minimum wage, and establishing a universal public healthcare system. He identified himself as a democratic socialist, railing against the billionaire class and their “greed and reckless behaviour.”

Sanders won an unprecedented number of votes for a socialist candidate in the US; yet he failed twice to win the nomination of his party. As the US uses a presidential system as opposed to a parliamentary system, and as the structure of American political parties is entirely different to what we have in this country, the Sanders campaigns are not comparable to what left-wing activists might hope to see here.

Jeremy Corbyn’s successful campaign for the leadership of the UK Labour Party is a much more instructive example. Thanks to colonisation, the New Zealand Parliament is modelled directly on the British Westminster system. The main differences between their system and ours are that Britain has a House of Lords as well as a House of Commons, and that Britain still uses first-past-the-post, the electoral system we abandoned in favour of MMP in 1993.

Parliamentary parties are structured similarly in the UK to how they are here. This is particularly true in the case of the NZLP, which is a sister party to Labour in the UK. The example of the Corbyn movement is therefore the closest comparison we can make between Aotearoa and a country which has seen a left-wing insurgency within a mainstream centre-left party.

Between 1983 and 2015, Jeremy Corbyn served as a backbench Labour MP. He was among the most rebellious MPs in his party, consistently voting against the neoliberal Blair/Brown Government on issues such as privatisation and the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Corbyn was part of the Socialist Campaign Group (SCG), a small group of between 20 to 40 left-wing MPs committed to returning Labour to its roots as the party of the working class. The SCG vision of socialism was more Marxist than it was Keynesian; although they fought to defend the welfare state against Thatcherism in the 1980s and against austerity in the 2010s, their ambition went beyond the reestablishment of the postwar consensus. Corbyn and his comrades were proudly anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, and committed to a socialist vision based on peace, justice and democracy for the many.

Here is the first hurdle that a left-wing insurgency within the NZLP would come up against. If such a faction exists within the current caucus, its existence is a tightly-kept secret. There are certainly ‘soft left’ MPs — social democrats with ties to the union movement who would like to see a slightly stronger focus on workers — but it is hard to see who their leader is at this stage. Michael Wood was seen by some last term as the leading figure on the soft left, but Wood lost his once-safe seat in Mt. Roskill in the 2023 election when the Labour vote crumbled in Auckland. The ‘soft left’ are not radicals like Corbyn — they merely want Labour to move an inch or two further to the left within the Third Way neoliberal paradigm.

There is no hard left faction inside the NZLP caucus. The most outspoken and rebellious wing of the party broke away when Jim Anderton led a split in 1989, disgusted by the right-wing reforms of the Rogernomics period. Anderton’s NewLabour Party went on to become the dominant faction within the Alliance, the coalition of parties to the left of Labour which won 18.2% of the vote in the 1993 election.

Electoral record of the Alliance, 1993-2002. Source: Wikipedia.

Anderton was the most prominent social democrat to oppose Aotearoa’s neoliberal turn. But even he was hardly an equivalent figure to Corbyn — his goal was to return Labour to the Keynesian policies it championed between 1935 and 1984. When it came down to it, he was happy enough to be a Minister in the Third Way Clark Government from 1999 to 2008.

The Alliance collapsed when Anderton along with three of his colleagues voted with the government in favour of the War in Afghanistan. The other six MPs, and much of the membership, were opposed. The Alliance represented the most left-wing tradition of the postwar NZLP; its leadership was barely left-wing compared to the Socialist Campaign Group; and it is now a long-dead party.

At the beginning of 2015, Corbyn remained a relatively obscure figure in UK politics. When Labour lost that year’s election, leader Ed Miliband stepped down. Three Third Way candidates emerged to replace him — Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall. The SCG decided to put Corbyn forward as the fourth candidate. They did so because they believed that an anti-austerity, anti-war candidate was needed in the leadership race to try and shift the debate to the left.

No one in the party, not even in the SGC, thought that Corbyn could actually win. Bookmakers early on put his odds of victory at 200/1.

One year earlier, Labour had changed its leadership rules to a one-person, one-vote system, with members of the party and affiliated trade unions eligible to vote. Additionally, any member of the public who paid £5 to register as a supporter was now also given a vote. The previous voting system had been an electoral college, in which one-third of the vote was allocated to MPs, one-third to party members, and the remaining one-third to affiliates. Under the new system, the only sway MPs held was in the nominating process, as candidates needed to be nominated by 15% of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) in order to stand.

The 2014 rule change was seen as a victory for the Blairite faction of the party against the soft left, as the common sense was that the general public was more conservative than most Labour MPs. Pundits believed that the new rules would drag the party further to the right; and some Blairite MPs nominated Corbyn because they believed his candidacy would be so unpopular that the left as a whole would be humiliated. They were completely out of touch with what was happening in British society.

If they wanted to know who the new leadership rules would favour, journalists and MPs should have looked to the streets. Hundreds of thousands of people had spent five years marching against the Conservative-led Coalition’s harsh austerity measures. A wave of strikes and campus occupations took place — not since the resistance to Thatcherism had unions and social movements been so combative.

Corbyn and his allies supported the movements, linking arms with protesters while the Labour leadership ignored them. Miliband, despite being on the soft left himself, had campaigned in the 2015 election on an ‘austerity-lite’ manifesto which promised to ease rather than end the cuts.

Corbyn only just squeezed onto the ballot, gaining the crucial 35th nomination he needed at the last possible minute. Once debates and public meetings began, his leadership campaign exploded in popularity. People queued around the block to hear this once-obscure figure make a clear and principled case against austerity. Activists flooded into the Labour Party, and membership exploded from 200,000 to nearly 300,000. It would later peak at close to 600,000, as Labour under Corbyn became the largest party in western Europe. More than 100,000 people registered as supporters, overwhelmingly to vote for the eventual winner.

UK Labour Party membership, 1928-2023. Source: Wikipedia.

When the final result was declared, Corbyn’s overwhelming mandate was revealed: he won 251,417 votes, or 59.5%. Even among party members alone, excluding supporters and affiliates, he won 49.6% on the first ballot against three opponents. The Third Way MPs, so used to controlling the party with an iron grip, looked shell-shocked — the Blairite candidate Liz Kendall came last, receiving just 4.5% of the vote.

The NZLP did not allow party members to have any say in leadership elections until an electoral college system was implemented in 2012. From 2012 onwards, 40% of the vote was given to MPs, 40% to members, and 20% to affiliated trade unions, with candidates requiring nominations from 10% of caucus to stand.

In 2021, the rules were changed to give more power back to the parliamentary party. Today, the initial round of voting takes place in caucus using a ranked-choice system, to determine if any candidate can secure the support of two-thirds of MPs. Only if no candidate reaches this two-thirds threshold is the electoral college system used, meaning members only get a say if caucus is divided.

Crucially, if a leader either steps down or is removed by a vote of no confidence within three months of a general election, a new leader can be chosen by a simple majority of caucus using the ranked-choice system. In this scenario, members and affiliated unions can be bypassed entirely. A leader who faces significant opposition from MPs can be removed in the run-up to an election regardless of how much support they have outside of caucus.

Corbyn faced overwhelming opposition from his own MPs. He was forced to fight a second leadership election in 2016 after a no-confidence motion was passed by more than 80% of the PLP. The Blairite-controlled National Executive Committee ruled that members who had joined the party in the last six months were ineligible to vote unless they paid the registered supporters fee, which was raised from £5 to £25. Only two days were given to register as a supporter. Despite these obvious attempts to rig the process, Corbyn was reelected with 313,209 votes (61.8%), an increase of more than 60,000.

Even after this increased mandate from the membership, a significant number of MPs spent the entirety of Corbyn’s tenure undermining him. Even MPs from the soft left participated in this campaign to bring down their elected leader — it wasn’t only the Blairites trying to oust him at all costs. Diane Abbott described this campaign as an attempt to “break him as a man.”

In April 2017, Theresa May called a snap election. The campaign would last for less than seven weeks. Labour were polling at just 24%, and the Conservatives were predicted to win an unprecedented landslide majority. Had the UK Labour Party followed the same rules that the NZLP currently uses, Blairite MPs would have simply ousted Corbyn there and then. Thankfully, they did not have the power to do so.

Corbyn ran a campaign so inspired that it captured the attention of socialists the world over. In the face of clear hostility from big business and the mainstream media, the party released an anti-austerity manifesto entitled For the Many, Not the Few. The radical document promised to raise significant taxes on the top 5% of British households in order to bring vital utilities back into public ownership and invest in public services and infrastructure. It included a sorely needed expansion of workers’ rights, a green transition away from fossil fuels, and an end to UK involvement in illegal wars.

The manifesto was wildly popular, with polls showing majority support for its major proposals. An army of volunteers were mobilised across the country to canvas for Corbyn. Many young people felt hopeful about politics for the first time in their lives, and there was a significant increase in youth turnout. Young voters overwhelmingly favoured Labour, in a phenomenon that was dubbed the “youthquake.”

Instead of winning a landslide, Theresa May lost her majority in Parliament. It was the first time Labour had gained seats in an election since Blair’s victory in 1997. The Labour vote surged to 40% — up 16 points from the party’s polling at the beginning of the campaign. This vote share was 9.6% higher than 2015, making it the party’s biggest increase in vote share since 1945. 12.9 million people voted for a party campaigning on a socialist manifesto.

Whatsapp messages leaked three years later revealed that Blairite party staffers — a hangover from Corbyn’s predecessors — were shellshocked when they saw the exit poll predicting Labour gains. They had been hoping that Corbyn would suffer a defeat devastating enough that he would be forced to resign in disgrace. His opponents to this day smear him as unelectable; but the number of votes received by the Labour Party under Corbyn’s leadership remains its high water mark this century.

Corbyn never won a majority, and he never became Prime Minister. The issue of Brexit tore Labour’s voter base apart in the lead-up to the 2019 election, and Corbyn was unable to make wealth redistribution the clear focus of his campaign like he had in 2017. He had no choice to resign after Boris Johnson won a large majority, with Labour’s vote dropping by 7.9%. This defeat was greatly exaggerated by the disproportionate nature of the first-past-the-post electoral system — the ‘unelectable’ Corbyn still won a higher vote share in 2019 than his predecessors had managed in 2010 or 2015.

Nevertheless, Corbyn came closer to winning power than any radical left leader in the Anglosphere ever has before. Had he not been relentlessly sabotaged by his own MPs and party bureaucrats, who knows how many more votes and seats Labour could have won? 2017 was a close enough contest that it is possible Corbyn could have become Prime Minister had he not been fatally undermined.

Instead, Corbyn has been expelled from the party he dedicated his life to by his successor Keir Starmer. The Starmer-led Labour Party won a landslide majority of seats in the 2024 election, but did so with a record low share of the popular vote for a winning party, amidst the second-lowest turnout since the UK adopted universal suffrage. Labour won fewer votes in 2024 than in 2019, let alone 2017. The Starmer Government experienced an ‘historic’ collapse in popularity almost immediately after entering office, as the new Prime Minister ruled out any notion of tackling wealth inequality, committed himself to continuing austerity by implementing cuts that even the Tories refused to consider, and refused to enact an arms embargo on the genocidal state of Israel.

UK Labour Party election results, 2001-2024. Source: Wikipedia.

Corbyn is now faced with the need to create a new left-wing party in the UK. He successfully held his seat as an independent in the 2024 election after being expelled from the Labour Party. Four other ‘Gaza independents’ also won seats from Labour; the Greens meanwhile won four seats, having previously held just one seat in their entire history. These results represented unprecedented success for left-of-Labour candidates in Britain.

But the xenophobic right are also on the move. Nigel Farage’s Reform party won a record four million votes. An emboldened far-right street movement started racist riots in the wake of the election. Britain needs transformational change even more today than it did in 2015.

Any left-wing leader of the New Zealand Labour Party would face the same level of hostility from business, mainstream media outlets and Third Way MPs that Corbyn did. The neoliberal establishment is deeply resistant to transformational change, and most Labour MPs are part of that establishment — in Aotearoa as in Britain.

Yet that is not the only barrier to a left-wing takeover of the NZLP. There is no hard left faction in Parliament, not even a single socialist MP who could lead the charge; even if there was, they wouldn’t get the nominations to stand for leader; even if they did, they would be blocked by two-thirds of caucus; even if they weren’t, they would need to win a mandate from an electoral college in which MPs hold hugely disproportionate sway; and even if they won in this system, a simple majority of MPs could oust and replace them three months out from an election.

A campaign to transform the NZLP would need to start from the bottom-up. It would need to involve replacing the majority of the existing caucus with socialist candidates, and campaigning for a one-member, one-vote party democracy.

Such a campaign would take years of hard work. It would require open hostility from the Labour membership towards its own leaders, without any guarantee of this hostility translating into success. Either more than half of current members would have to turn entirely against the party they chose to join, or enough left-wing activists would need to sign up to Labour to overwhelm the existing members — enough activists that it would be easier to simply start a new party altogether.

People flooded to support the Corbyn campaign because they knew that electing a principled left-wing leader would be a shortcut to the mass movements against austerity and war winning mainstream representation in British politics. Although the Corbyn project did not fundamentally change the makeup of the Labour Party, and although Third Way MPs were allowed to remain in a position where they could continually undermine and eventually purge Corbyn, this project did mean that for four years, one of the two major parties in Britain offered real hope of real change in the interests of working class people.

There is no such lightning rod here to attract a sudden rush of momentum for a takeover of the NZLP. The Labour hierarchy in this country is unlikely to repeat the same errors that enabled Corbyn’s ascension — MPs and party bureaucrats here will have learned their own lessons from what occurred in the UK. A soft left leader of the NZLP is possible if Hipkins fails to win in 2026; but a transformational leader opposed to neoliberalism altogether is virtually out of the question.

A Socialist Party Is Needed

The New Zealand Labour Party is what it is. An incrementalist Third Way party, willing to deliver small crumbs to unions and social movements when pressured. But it is incredibly unlikely that Labour will ever return to being a socialist party of the working class; it is unlikely that it will implement Treaty-based constitutional transformation; and it would take an absolute miracle for Labour to adopt the kind of radical programme for climate action that is desperately required for the survival of humanity.

Chris Hipkins remains the leader. He is not going to experience a Damascene conversion to radical politics. Complacent rhetoric about the inevitability of the Coalition being a one-term government is foolish given there is no coherent alternative being presented; Hipkins may well lead Labour to another defeat. If he does, don’t expect his successor to be anything better than a soft left leader who will soften the edges of neoliberal capitalism rather than transform the system.

Thankfully, unlike the UK, Aotearoa has a proportional representation system which has created a multi-party democracy. Whilst neither the Greens or Te Pāti Māori are parties based on the working class, both are currently committed to policy platforms clearly to the left of Labour. Both parties would place some leftward pressure on a Labour Government if they entered into a coalition.

But the need for a party created by and for the working class remains; a party which will not abandon its socialist principles like Labour has. Activists, socialists and trade unionists in Aotearoa are faced with the question: when is the right time for the formation of such a party?

We know that transformational change in Aotearoa is necessary. We know that we need a radical redistribution of wealth from the top 1% to the working class. The situation is filled with desperate urgency by the austerity and racism of the Coalition, and by the looming threat of climate change. We know that Labour will not deliver transformational change. But the impetus for change has to come from somewhere. An alternative to the Labour Party must emerge.

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Welcome to my Substack! Thanks for reading.

My name is Elliot Crossan, and I am a socialist writer and activist based in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. I am the Chair of System Change Aotearoa, an ecosocialist campaign group. This article has been republished from our website, which you can check out here.

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