System Change Aotearoa is hosting a public meeting with Sue Bradford on Tuesday, 20th August on the question: Does Aotearoa Need a New Radical Left-Wing Party? In the lead-up, System Change Chair Elliot Crossan analyses the prospect that the New Zealand Labour Party could become a vehicle for transformational change.

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 even if National and NZ First refuse to sign ACT’s most extreme policy into law, they are still set to unleash an avalanche of racist policies. Benefit sanctions and ‘tough on crime’ policies 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 of Michael Joseph Savage and Peter Fraser, elected in 1935, knew how to use three-year terms to deliver transformational change to benefit working people. The Fourth Labour Government 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 — National, ACT and NZ First know that even if they are only a one-term government, moving at speed and scale means they will achieve more than the Ardern-Hipkins government did in two terms; perhaps even more than the Clark and Key-English governments achieved in three.

Chris Hipkins last year led Labour to its second-worst election defeat since the 1920s, with the biggest fall in vote share that either major party has ever experienced. Ardern in her five years failed to deliver the transformational change she had promised in 2017; upon becoming Prime Minister, Hipkins 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 popularity of such policies. At the precise time that Labour needed to move left, and deliver radical reform in the interests of its working class voter base who were suffering in the cost of living crisis, the government instead moved right, and went down in flames as a result.

The fact that Hipkins remains leader of the Opposition is a clear sign that the Labour Party does not intend to change direction. Activists will not tolerate this; we will 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, social movements know that transformational change is not just desirable, but necessary now more than ever before.

The incrementalism of Hipkins, following in the footsteps of his predecessors Ardern and Clark, fits perfectly into the mould of Third Way politics which has dominated the western centre-left since the 1990s. The ‘Third Way’ was the agenda of Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, political leaders who sought to adapt to the neoliberal revolution of the previous decade rather than overturn it. Blair and Clinton left the low-tax, low-spend, privatised economic model of the free market in place, and only offered mild tweaks to the supposed ‘trickle down’ system which kept allowing the rich to get richer and richer. Third Way politics has been hegemonic within the New Zealand Labour Party (NZLP) since Helen Clark’s leadership.

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 overseas have attempted to capture the leadership of the leading centre-left parties in their countries in order to force them to adopt transformative politics, in the knowledge that existing leaders are resistant to any real change. Activists demanded that social democratic parties abandon neoliberalism and austerity, and side with workers instead of the corporate interests that these parties had served for two decades.

Could this phenomenon occur within the NZLP? Austerity and sociopolitical polarisation have belatedly arrived upon the shores of Aotearoa, mirroring the experience of many European countries in the 2010s. Is now the moment for activists to take over the Labour Party and turn it into a vehicle for transformational change, returning it to its founding purpose of representing the working class?

More on the 2023 NZ election

More on the crisis within centre-left parties in the 2010s

The Corbyn Comparison

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 as a democratic socialist and railed against the billionaire class and their “greed and reckless behaviour.” He won an unprecedented number of votes for a socialist candidate in the US, but failed both times to win the nomination. However, as the United States has a presidential system and an entirely different party structure to Aotearoa, 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 comparable example for activists in Aotearoa. The colonial New Zealand state and parliament are modelled 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 in the UK are generally structured similarly to how they are in this country, particularly in the case of the NZLP, which is largely modelled on the UK Labour Party. This example is 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 20-40 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 for immediate social democratic reforms to improve the lives of workers, Corbyn and his comrades were proudly anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, and committed to a socialist world based on peace, justice and genuine democracy.

Here is the first hurdle a left-wing movement in the NZLP would come up against. If such a faction exists within the existing Labour caucus, it is very secretive indeed. There are certainly ‘soft left’ MPs, social democrats with ties to the union movement, 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 leftwards, rather than committing unreservedly to transformational change outside of the Third Way neoliberal paradigm.

There is no hard left faction in the NZLP. The most outspoken, rebellious wing of the NZLP broke away in 1989, when Jim Anderton led a split from the party in disgust at the right-wing reforms of the Rogernomics period. Anderton created the NewLabour Party, which later became the dominant faction within the Alliance, the left-of-Labour party which won an impressive 18.2% of the vote in the 1993 election.

*Electoral record of the Alliance, 1993-2002*

Anderton was the most prominent social democrat to oppose neoliberalism. But even he was hardly an equivalent figure to Corbyn — his vision was to return to the Keynesian social democratic policies championed by Labour between 1935 and 1984; and when it came down to it, he was happy enough being a Minister in the Third Way Clark Government from 1999 to 2008. The Alliance split and then collapsed when Anderton and three of his colleagues voted with Labour in favour of the War in Afghanistan. The Alliance represented the most left-wing element of the postwar NZLP; its leadership was barely radical compared to the SCG; 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, and 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 in order to shift the debate to the left; they didn’t think in a million years that they would actually win. Bookmakers early on put Corbyn’s odds of victory at 200/1.

The year before, 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, as well as any member of the public who paid £5 to register as a supporter. 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 were more conservative than most Labour MPs. Pundits believed that the new rules would drag the party further to the right; some Blairite MPs even nominated Corbyn because they believed his candidacy would be so unpopular that the hard left 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 on an austerity-lite manifesto, promising to reduce, rather than end, the government’s cuts to public spending.

The Corbyn leadership campaign squeezed onto the ballot at the last possible minute. Once debates and public meetings began, the campaign exploded. 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 became the largest party in western Europe under Corbyn’s radical leadership. More than 100,000 people registered as supporters, overwhelmingly to vote for Corbyn.

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

Shockingly, the NZLP did not allow party members to vote for the leader at all 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. But in 2021, the rules were changed again to give more power back to MPs — today, the initial round of voting takes place in caucus through an alternative vote ballot, to see if any candidate can secure the support of two-thirds of Labour MPs. Only if no candidate reaches this two-thirds threshold is the electoral college system used, allowing members to have a say.

Crucially, within three months of a general election, a new leader can be chosen by caucus through a preferential vote if the previous leader steps down or is removed through a vote of no confidence. This means that members and affiliated unions can be bypassed entirely, and that a leader who faces significant opposition from MPs can be removed 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. He won this election by 313,209 votes (61.8%), an increase of 61,792 (2.3%.) Even after this renewed 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 bring him down 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 with less than seven weeks notice. Labour were polling at just 24%, and the Conservatives were predicted to win a landslide majority of unprecedented scale. Had the UK Labour Party followed the rules of the NZLP, the PLP would have simply replaced 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 left-wing activists 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 tax 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, and motivated an army of volunteers to mobilise across the country. Many young people felt hopeful about politics for the first time in their lives; this was reflected in polls estimating a significant increase in youth turnout in the election, with young voters overwhelmingly favouring Labour — this phenomenon was dubbed the “youthquake.”

Instead of a landslide, Theresa May lost her majority in Parliament. Labour surged to 40% of the vote — 16% up from the beginning of the campaign, and 9.6% up on 2015, 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 party staffers — who had been hired by Corbyn’s Third Way predecessors — were shellshocked at the result. They had been hoping that Corbyn would suffer a defeat devastating enough that he would be forced to resign in disgrace. His opponents smear him as unelectable; but the number of votes received by the party under Corbyn’s leadership remains its high water mark this century.

Corbyn never won a majority, and he never won the popular vote. He resigned as leader after the 2019 election, when the issue of Brexit tore Labour’s voter base apart. But he came closer than any radical left leader in the Anglosphere has ever come to winning power. Had he not been relentlessly sabotaged by his own MPs and party employees, who knows how many more votes and seats Labour could have won. 2017 was close enough 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 new Starmer-led Labour Government 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 is already declining in popularity just weeks after entering office, as it has committed itself to austerity and refused to enact an immediate arms embargo on the genocidal regime of Israel.

Corbyn is now faced with the need to create a new left-wing party in the UK. Corbyn won his seat as an independent after being purged from his former party, as did four other ‘Gaza independents’ who won seats from Labour; the Greens meanwhile won four seats, having previously held just one seat in their history. These results represented unprecedented success for left-of-Labour candidates in Britain. But the far-right are also on the move, with Nigel Farage’s Reform party winning four million votes. Riots have broken out in recent weeks, in an horrific display of racist, Islamophobic violence. Britain needs transformational change, for the many not the few, even more today than it did in 2015.

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

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.

Thus, a campaign to transform the NZLP would need to start from the bottom-up. It would need to involve both replacing the Third Way majority of Labour MPs with socialist candidates, and campaigning for a one-member, one-vote party democracy.

Such a campaign would take years of hard work. It would involve huge hostility from the Labour membership towards its own leaders, without any guarantee of success. Either more than half of current members would have to turn entirely against the party they chose to join, or enough radical 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 the Corbyn campaign because they knew that electing a leader from the radical left would be a shortcut to social 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 leadership in this country are unlikely to repeat the organisational errors that allowed Corbyn’s ascension — they will have learned their own lessons from what occurred in the UK. A soft left leader of the NZLP is possible; 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. A moderate, incrementalist Third Way party, which will deliver small crumbs to unions and social movements when pressured, and when under intense and sustained pressure may even yield slightly more than crumbs. 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 unless it has no other option; 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 is the leader. Noone expects him to experience a Damascene conversion to radical politics. Complacent rhetoric about the inevitability of the Coalition being a one-term government is foolish when they remain ahead in the polls despite their divisive agenda — Hipkins may well lead Labour to another defeat. If he does, don’t expect his successor to be anything more 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 allows us to have a multi-party democracy. Whilst neither the Greens or Te Pāti Māori are class-based parties, both are committed to policy platforms clearly to the left of Labour. Both parties would put some 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 for working people in Aotearoa is necessary. 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.

Elliot Crossan is a writer and activist from Auckland. He is the Chair of ecosocialist campaign group System Change Aotearoa.

System Change is hosting Sue Bradford next week to discuss the question: Does Aotearoa Need a New Radical Left-Wing Party. The event is at 6pm on Tuesday 20th August at the Auckland Irish Club (Rocky Nook Ave, located within Fowlds Park, Morningside, Auckland). RSVP here if you are interested in attending.

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