Tag Archives: John Minto

What is success for Internet MANA?

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In the previous two posts I’ve covered the strategic rationales behind the Internet MANA alliance, and how, even if they spend their money very inefficiently, they are still very likely to gain a stronger presence in Parliament. But what does success actually look like for Internet MANA?

This is a complex question to answer because Internet MANA, for all its potential, is a mess of vanity projects existing in a state of ideological and pragmatic tension. But tensions all resolve sooner or later.

Kim Dotcom: Disruption (a change of government, or 10%)
Of all these vanity projects, Kim Dotcom’s is the greatest. It’s hard to imagine a guy who donated $50k to John Banks starting a cyber-utopian radical-left-aligned political vehicle for altruistic reasons, and it seems plain that he means to prevent, by any possible means, his extradition to the USA on copyright infringement and money-laundering charges. This is fair enough from his perspective — he can’t spend his pile in a US prison. NZ is a well-chosen target: a country with a small (therefore shallow, cheaply-manipulated) political system, but, unusually, also possessing a reasonably robust and independent judiciary.

To get his extradition case thrown out, Kim Dotcom needs to change the government, and prevail upon an incoming Minister of Justice that he and his party are great assets to that government.

The likelihood of this is slim, because he has already antagonised Labour, and because the leader of his own party has insisted she will not be led on the matter. Other members of the radical left groups aligned with the party are probably supportive of his ideological aim here, if only due to generalised anti-authoritarianism and anti-Americanism. And the other branch of Kim Dotcom’s game is fame, or notoriety, and if he can put his disruption engine in parliament, he will gain that, and it may provide him strategic cover for other manoeuvres regardless of who is in government.

The other way it could happen is if Internet MANA shocks everyone and polls very high — say, 10% — which would ruin almost everyone’s coalition plans. This is also extremely unlikely, but clearly it is Kim Dotcom’s hope, and it would be the purest sort of success for everyone involved.

Laila Harré: A launch (5%+) or a lifeboat (3%)
Her return to politics with the Greens last year was welcomed, and the conventional wisdom is that her appointment to lead the Internet Party was a strategic coup. I agree. But as I discussed in the first post, the deck is stacked in Te Mana’s favour. It is plausible, if the alliance performs poorly, that Harré would find herself marooned amid the wreckage of the Internet Party as its only MP, or even outside parliament, when the Internet MANA agreement expires six weeks after the election.

There’s a quirk here: Te Mana gets list places 1,3 and 4; Internet Party 2, 5 and 6, after which they alternate. So if they win five seats or fewer, Te Mana MPs will outnumber the Internet Party’s. If they win six or more seats, the numbers are more or less even. This provides a strong incentive for the Internet Party to perform, and also suggests shrewd negotiation by Te Mana.

In the event that the Internet Party bring Harré only into parliament (four seats or fewer), or if Kim Dotcom withdraws his cash and the party structure is no longer found to be self-sustaining, it seems very likely that Harré would join Te Mana formally. While her history in parties of this sort is its own guide, I suspect they would welcome her and it would be a fruitful arrangement: a win, of sorts, both for her and Te Mana.

The Internet Party: A future (7%)
The Internet Party doesn’t really exist. Kim Dotcom exists and Laila Harré exists, but without them it has no motive force. It could acquire such force by gaining a very substantial share of the party vote (7-8%, or 9-10 MPs), half of whom woulf be from the Internet Party, which could possibly — not probably — become self-sustaining. Without Laila Harré’s star power and Kim Dotcom’s money, this is a hard row for Vikram Kumar and the Candidate Idol contestants to hoe.

Te Mana and Hone Harawira: The only way is up
Te Mana’s case is easiest here: everything looks like a win for them. They have one MP facing a strong electorate challenge and polling under 1%, with no money, who is almost universally hated by the political mainstream. Even a mediocre performance of 2-3% would see Annette Sykes and possibly John Minto join Hone Harawira in parliament, which would make for some impressive fireworks. Even if the party then has to fend for itself, as Kim Dotcom’s largesse expires, or he is shipped off overseas, they have been granted a rare opportunity to galvanise the marginal electorate, and that’s better than under any other conceivable scenario.

The Left: It’s complicated
Given Labour’s current posture towards all parties that aren’t Labour, there is no way that Internet MANA benefits the left generally in the immediate term. Many commentators — Phil Quin has a good example at Pundit — have argued that the mere existence of Internet MANA could return John Key with a clean majority and the ability to have his way with Aotearoa in a glorious third term. I think this is pretty plausible. By no means does the left look like winning this election. But Labour has been underperforming for most of the past decade, and it might be that an injection of crazy disruptive ideas from a weird agglomeration of old leftwing radicals and young idealistic crypto-libertarians is what they need to shock them back to their senses.

There remains the slight possibility that they will bring enough MPs into parliament to make a chaotic and unholy alliance of the left a just slightly less-bad alternative to the Golden Age of John Key. As an aside: the better the Greens do, the better for Internet MANA post-election; and if nothing else they should hopefully form a strong ideological and generational counterpoint to New Zealand First, which I fear starts to fancy itself as the UKIP of the South Seas.

Aotearoa as a whole
I think New Zealand is better off having this argument than not. Much of what Internet MANA stands for has been unduly marginalised and is due consideration; especially the emergent aspects, such as with regard to modern standards of surveillance, the relationship and competing loyalties of the state to the citizenry and to its international community, and to the comparatively trivial matter of copyright. These debates feed into the notions of sovereignty and the primacy of people, rather than corporations and institutions, which mobilise Te Mana, and there are significant areas of ideological overlap, such as the flagship Internet Party policies of free tertiary education, withdrawal from the TPPA, severe constraints on the GCSB and other security and intelligence services, and — less popular with Hone Harawira than with his voters — the decriminalisation of marijuana. These are debates worth having, and we will be better off for having had them, whether the major parties want to or not.

L

Mongrel renegades, castaways, and cannibals

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So Herman Melville described the crew of the Pequod. While it probably seems tendentious to equate them to the Internet MANA party, that seems to be how Kim Dotcom, at least, regards himself — as Captain Ahab, nailing his doubloon to the mast and urging them to seek the destruction of his Prime Ministerial Moby-Dick. But in spite of the many failings he, or Ishmael, attributed to them, that crew were good people, enormously effective, and very nearly successful in their hopeless task of hunting a single whale across all the oceans of the world.

In spite of Dotcom’s megalomania, Key — unlike the white whale — just doesn’t care that much. But in any case, the hauling-together of two unlikely vessels that form the Internet MANA alliance is more interesting than one rich eccentric’s personal grudge, or his attempts to avoid extradition.

The conventional reading of Internet MANA — even among some on the left — is that Kim Dotcom has colonised the Mana movement, buying himself a tame savage who’ll do his dirty work for him. But I don’t think so: I think the Internet Party is trying to bite off more than it can chew.

The Mana movement has always been about those outside the political mainstream. Even while he was forced into collaboration, Hone Harawira was plain about his radicalism. His legacy — barring some major change — is unlikely to be that period, or Te Mana, but the previous three decades of dogged activism in service of his people. One of these was his role in the haka party incident which demonstrated — or rather, reiterated after a long hiatus — to Pākehā New Zealand that Māori were’t going to take it.

Even so, if it were just Harawira this colonisation line might be fair — he’s a tough and principled guy, but running a fringe party without a benefactor — in the form of an electoral liege, or a millionaire backer, or both — is hard going. (Ask Winston Peters.) But Harawira is not alone. Both Annette Sykes and John Minto have decades of unglamorous and largely unrewarded activism behind them, and enormous credibility. Not among the National and Labour-voting public, but in radical and Māori circles, where it counts for their purposes. There is clearly some division — Sue Bradford quit the party, prompting a rush of right-wingers who have for decades said the most vile things about her to praise her integrity. But all in all, few people who know them believe that all of Harawira, Minto, and Sykes can be bought, in one go.

To which add Laila Harré. Many people have written that her appointment as leader of the Internet Party brings it credibility, and I agree. It is a brave, or reckless, appointment from Kim Dotcom’s perspective, because Harré is bigger than he is and, if elected, will influence the party more by leading it than he will by funding it — especially when his largesse runs out, as it inevitably will. Her parliamentary achievements have been limited because of her commitment to activism, but her record outside parliament has been more significant. She has demonstrated she can’t be bought, and is willing to hold her own line and walk away from a bad political situation, even when the stakes are very high.

What’s cleverest about this alliance is how neatly it separates ends and means. Morgan Godfery has argued persuasively that the alliance is a deeply conventional bit of strategy and an obvious next-step, from a Māori nationalist perspective, both mainstream and nationalist-insurgent political vehicles for Tino Rangatiratanga having been thoroughly co-opted by mainstream (white) imperatives. I would say further that it indicates a strategic maturity we have not yet seen from Māori parliamentary parties, and an elaboration of the māori party’s strategy of pragmatic coupling, though this time, to a vehicle it can more readily control. At least in this case, the Internet Party’s agenda is clear.

The two parties seem incongruous, and they are — but what they have in common is a claim to stand for those who feel like mainstream politics doesn’t speak for them, or listen to them. Both parties have links to the Occupy movement, and the policy platforms are pitched at groups with some core interests in common: those who are (or feel) criminalised or oppressed by the mainstream, and who wish to disrupt it. These include tech-libertarians and utopian futurists, internet “pirates” and disaffected geeks, anti-GCSB and TPPA activists, land rights and Māori sovereignty activists, actual socialists (as opposed to the Labour kind), the very poor and economically marginalised (especially rural, Māori), marijuana smokers, and a more fringey element of anti-Fluoride campaigners and other assorted cranks and conspiracists. In aggregate it seems clear that these people comprise more than 5% of the electorate — if only you can get them to vote. And that’s what Kim Dotcom’s millions are for: not so much to persuade them of a single, coherent policy platform, but to fly a radical banner to which the disruptors can flock. For this purpose they need not be all of one kind.

Te Mana has its own marginal voters, which comprise less than 1% of the electorate, and because of the difficulty of persuading it seems unlikely the Internet Party will mobilise much more. But a party vote total of 1.5% should see a second MP, and anything much above 2% should see a third, and this does not seem totally implausible. Even if these are “new” voters — not drawn from Labour or Greens — this probably comes at cost to the wider left if mainstream swing-voters are scared from Labour to National by the prospect of a left coalition including Internet MANA, as Danyl and Russell Brown have suggested. It might well be that the success of Internet MANA weakens Labour’s prospects, but it seems to have little chance of victory anyway, and has declared against Internet MANA, so a robust challenge from the left — as well as the one it has had from John Key on the right — is probably a good thing in the long term. What cares Mana for the neoliberal Pākehā Labour party’s fortunes?

Paradoxically, the addition of Internet Party voters would give Mana voters a stronger chance at locking the Internet party — and Harré — out if they are suspicious of Kim Dotcom’s influence. Harawira is facing a strong challenge in Te Tai Tokerau, but Waiariki is also close. If Labour, Green or Māori party voters tactically support Annette Sykes, hers could be the anchor seat. In this case, the second MP (whether he wins Te Tai Tokerau or not) would be Hone Harawira, with Harré third. Given that two or three MPs seems much more plausible than four or five, the most likely outcome seems to be that Te Mana is no worse off, possibly better off, and has a chance to swap Sue Bradford for the much more politically-viable Laila Harré. It looks less like the Internet Party colonising the Mana movement than the opposite.

L

Primary thoughts on Te Mana

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My thoughts on Te Mana aren’t very mature — they are very mixed, and quite primary, and I’m afraid I’m not very well informed. I’ve also been insanely busy the past few months — and especially the past month, and have had little time to focus on it. But last week I received a request by email from a regular KP commenter to post my thoughts on Te Mana, and what follows is a somewhat expanded edit of the reply I sent to him.

The initial comments suggested concern that Te Mana might be “opportunistically” taken over by the Pākehā “far left”, and I do agree that Te Mana needs to be Māori-led, and its functions need to be safeguarded against hijack by the usual bandwagon-jumpers — among whom I include folk like John Minto, Socialist Aotearoa and so on. The māori party, I think it’s now pretty clear, has been significantly colonised by Pākehā interests on the right, and if Te Mana is to prove any more robust, it must insure itself against the same happening from the other side. As a minor party, above all it needs to have focus and discipline, and too many chiefs (as it were) will lead to factionalisation, and that’s to everyone’s detriment. I’m not opposed to diversity within a movement, but I am against the leaders of one noisy faction taking over a movement for their own ends. That’s the major risk I see from people like John Minto and the principals of Socialist Aotearoa taking a prominent role: their vision isn’t the same as Hone’s, and although I expect they understand that, I’m certain the rank and file they command do not. Moreover, I think they’re a liability — even more than Hone is a liability, if possible — because they will turn off Māori as well as non-socialist Pākehā. That’s as far as my reasoned thoughts on the party’s internal dynamics go, and I welcome comment from anyone better informed on this topic than I am.

As far as where the party sits within NZ’s wider political context I think I have a better handle on things. The conventional wisdom about ACT and Te Mana engaging in a bit of mutual base-engagement is pretty good, but still a sideshow. The main event is (as ever) between National and Labour, and Te Mana’s relevance here rests on four main points.

First, Te Mana, with Hone likely to win Te Tai Tokerau, should be self-sustaining, at least for now. It needs to stand tall in the by-election to prove to people that they should support it in the general election. As far as Te Mana’s brand goes, the establishment Left distancing themselves is not really a bad thing (much more on this later). Te Mana needs to attract disenchanted māori party voters, and those who can’t be bothered voting for those parties. Its constituency needs to be positive-sum to as great an extent as possible, because the existing electoral offerings are broadly zero-sum.

Second, this is the establishment Left’s opportunity to say “for the past decade and a bit, National have been scaremongering about how we’re loony fringe extremists; socialists, communists, environmentalist haters of humanity, run by anti-family lesbians and all that — now Aotearoa gets to see what a real radical left party looks like.” The truth is that the Greens are perfectly moderate and gentle, and Labour are so ferociously orthodox they pose no meaningful threat to the established order of things, and Te Mana gives them a chance to illustrate that.

Third, and further to the second point, Te Mana provides Labour a crucial opportunity to differentiate from National. While historically the right has taken great glee in painting the Greens as the left’s equivalent of ACT, this is bogus. ACT is a genuine extremist party, espousing positions abhorrent even to many right-wingers, whose electoral existence in New Zealand relies upon them gaming the MMP threshold exemption because for most of the past decade they have been unable to persuade even one in 20 voters to support them. The Greens, on the other hand, represent a global movement whose positions and support are becoming more, not less, mainstream, and while not exactly rocketing skyward, their support remains strong and is steadily climbing. As much as the right wishes to claim the Greens are ACT’s left-wing equivalent, it is Te Mana who more appropriately fills that role. John Key was swift to label ACT and Don Brash ‘extremist’. He’s right, but he’s also protecting National’s voter base. This was tactically smart but strategically foolish, because Labour now get to label Te Mana as ‘extremist’ (‘radical’ is more correct, but that’s a technicality) and then say “National are working with the guy they admit is an extremist — we’re ruling out working with the extremist Mana Party. We’ve been telling you this whole term that John Key is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, and now he’s proven it.” They’ve done the first bit and I can only hope they have a plan to do the second bit, reclaiming the boring harmless sensible moderate ground they so richly deserve to hold.

Fourth (this wasn’t included in the email but is something I’ve argued elsewhere): while many people have pointed out that the by-election will cost money, which the three parties contesting it don’t have much of, by the same token it gives those parties an opportunity to go into the general election with a bit of momentum. It will give them a fair bit of media exposure (not all of which will be favourable), an opportunity to field-test their lines and positions. Most importantly, it will give the people involved — the candidates themselves, and the campaign managers and organisers and doorknockers and drivers and ringawera — valuable frontline experience. Falling into a rugby analogy: it gives the parties a chance to build match-fitness for the main event which follows.

Finally, I think the best outcome for both Labour and Te Mana here is the one Morgan has persuasively argued is most likely — for Hone Harawira to beat Kelvin Davis by a slim margin. Davis is a strong MP, if inexperienced, and although marginally placed at 33 on the list, should get in at the general election if Labour can at least maintain their polling. A tight contest will light a fire under both parties, which is valuable in and of itself. Hone Harawira has remained mostly true to his principles, undoubtedly represents a constituency and thus possesses at least a moral mandate to represent those who vote for him; Davis, also, but those principles are also represented by the Labour party. Hone would (on present polling of about 3%) bring in a couple of others, who would be in a position to advocate radical positions and apply pressure to the māori, Labour and Green parties while permitting Labour and Green to solidify their claim to the middle-ground, and would give the parties of the left an opportunity to feel each other out and reposition. More to the point, in terms of November 27 realpolitik, the lesson of NZ First in 2008 should be clear: if Hone doesn’t win his electorate and Te Mana doesn’t pass 5%, those votes are wasted, and National will be the main beneficiary. Labour’s future — in 2012 as it was in the past — is not to go it alone as the all-singing, all-dancing united left party, but at the core of a wider movement including the diverse and often misguided voices which characterise the wider left. Those horses (as has been exhaustively demonstrated by the NewLabour, Alliance and Progressive parties) cannot be bound by the same rope, and sometimes must be given their head.

L

Protesting a little bit too much

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21clarkyoungnats_smallDPF published two posts yesterday about prominent lefties comparing righties to fascists: Minto comparing Bush to Hitler and Amin, and Carter comparing Key to Mussolini. I agree with him that both comparisons are entirely unjustified, and do a great disservice to political discourse in this country.

But without taking away from that, let’s not forget that David, his commentariat, his blogging cohort and indeed some of his ideological allies have spent most of the past decade making political hay by comparing Helen Clark to various dictators. David was central to the Free Speech Coalition whose billboards protesting the Electoral Finance Act evoked Mao Zedong and Frank Bainimarama; he wrote a weekly column entitled ‘Dispatch from Helengrad’, perpetuating the Clark=Stalin syllogism; his blog permits and tacitly endorses the almost daily comparison of left-wing political figures to tyrants; his closest blogging acquaintance Cameron Slater has constructed his political profile almost entirely of such cloth. The National and ACT parties themselves have a very large portfolio of such comparisons — from the Young Nats publishing the famous image above, to Heather Roy talking about the Clark government’s ‘feminazi’ welfare agenda to Bill English’s frequent comparisons of the Clark government to the Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe, both in the House and in the media. And how could I forget John Banks — former National party cabinet minister and now Citizens & Ratepayers Mayor of Auckland — whose public comparisons of Clark to Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot and references to her as the ‘Chairman of the Central Committee’ among others only ceased when he decided to run for Mayor and they were no longer politically tenable. To say nothing of the foaming of various branches of the libertarian and objectivist movements, who are admittedly further from National than Labour are, but nevertheless have been occasional allies of convenience. Although typically less egregious than Carter’s and Minto’s comparisons, these are all the same in principle. The difference is one of magnitude, not of type. And the very worst examples of the type are exclusively from the right.

I should imagine that many of those who engaged in these sorts of attacks on Clark and her government but who are wide-eyed with mock outrage now that the shoe is on the other foot believe (to themselves if not in public) that the former comparisons were rooted in reality, while these latter are not and so are not justified. This demonstrates a phenomenal absence of political or historical perspective: Clark, like Bush, was removed peacefully from office by the ordinary process of democratic action, and the comparison of their programmes with those of the named dictators simply does not bear comparison, and it is disrespectful to history to draw it. David is right to point out that Labour are wrong for stooping to the level of National and ACT and their less-savoury constituents, but that does not erase the initial wrongness which spawned it, and in which he played a role.

L

[Edited to add Banksie and the libertarians to the list of offenders, and add the image at top.]