Posted by Blogger Name. Category:
2014 General Election
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Cluster failure
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David Cunliffe
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David Shearer
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Helen Clark
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Labour Party
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Phil Goff
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Shane Jones
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Vernon Small
Vernon Small is one of the more senior members of Parliament's Press Gallery. He has seen more MP's come and more MP's go than most of us have had hot dinners. So he's not given to going overboard.
That makes his column in yesterday's Dominion-Post even more noteworthy. Under the heading Church collapsed? Buy a house Small opines:
Helen Clark would have lowered her voice and with a hint of authority - and a side order of menace - drawled "it's time to move on".
Labour leader David Cunliffe must be hoping he can move the party, and the political agenda, on after what is surely the heart of darkness of his political year.
If things could get any worse than the cluster failure around Shane Jones' sudden departure to work for a government he was supposed to want out of office, it is hard to see what they could be.
When Mr Small says "cluster failure", we're pretty sure that he means a variant of that phrase, which also starts with "cluster", followed by the letter "f". But the Dom-Post is a polite newspaper, and such a turn of phrase might be frowned upon by Small's editor. However, we all get the picture.
And it has been a shocker of a week for David Cunliffe and his party. Shane Jones quite literally lobbed the electoral equivalent of a hand grenade into Labour's War Room, and the party's handling of the issue is deserving of the "clusterf#ck" label.
Small continues:
The danger for Cunliffe, in the wake of Jones' departure, is that with some in the party wading knee deep in vitriol it will spill over into civil war, revisiting the divisions of the 2012 annual conference. (That's the one where according to some Cunliffites the media fabricated Cunliffe's challenge to David Shearer's leadership.)
Already the same divisions are surfacing. On one side there are the "good riddance to Jones" merchants who seem to believe the broad church party would have a wider appeal if its MPs came from a smaller chapel. It sometimes seems they would rather people - voters - changed their ways rather than the party appealed to a broader array of views.
On the other side are those who lament the loss of Jones' appeal to Maori, soft centrist or conservative National voters but use his supposed straight talking - too many "geldings" in the party etc - to attack identity politics.
At times it becomes indistinguishable from prejudice and downplays the strong strand of liberal egalitarianism and concern for human rights at the party's core. Both axes seem to think tolerance is essential, as long as you agree with me.
Cunliffe's task is to heal those wounds yet again - as Clark mostly did after her messy coup against Mike Moore in 1993 - and get the party back to its core messages. There are, after all, only 20 weeks till polling day.
If a week is a long time in politics, the 20 weeks until the election must seem like an eternity to David Cunliffe. His party is in disarray, his policy launches have been botched, his party's social media efforts (including his own) have been ridiculed, and now his best-performing MP can see that there is not going to be much chance of a seat at the Cabinet table after 20th September.
The wounds within Labour are deep, and mere Band Aids will not suffice. Helen Clark, Phil Goff and David Shearer all resisted major surgey, but now that may be the only option Mr Cunliffe has left.
