Gareth Morgan – Evening Report

Bryce Edwards’ Political Roundup: Who’s going to vote for TOP?

Bryce Edwards — Thu, 23 Aug 2018 21:48:31 +0000

Bryce Edwards’ Political Roundup: Who’s going to vote for TOP?

[caption id="attachment_13635" align="alignright" width="150"] Dr Bryce Edwards.[/caption] Gareth Morgan made the decision to kill off The Opportunities Party (TOP) last month, but now it’s being resurrected under the leadership of former deputy leader Geoff Simmons. But does it really have a chance of breaking through in 2020, and gaining five per cent of the vote? Commentators have been overwhelmingly pessimistic about TOP’s chances. Conservative pundit Liam Hehir was first out of the blocks, writing about what the party is up against, despite the “congeniality” of the new leader – see: Opportunities Party faces significant challenges. Hehir’s most important point is his question about who is actually going to vote TOP: “Even with a new leader and more coherence, the obstacles remain formidable. It still remains unclear what TOP’s constituency is.” Hehir can’t see enough clarity about what the party stands for: “Last time round, TOP put forward a detailed, complex and idiosyncratic policy platform. There was no real unifying theme or simple message to it all. How are busy voters supposed to respond to something like that? Even then, parties with more natural power bases than TOP have failed to find an electoral groove.” I’ve also written on this basic problem in my column for Newsroom this week: “This issue of constituencies is vitally important because, historically, political parties have only been successful when they exist to champion a particular cleavage in society. These cleavages can be social or political – i.e. they can be demographic/sociological or ideological” – see: Why TOP will struggle. Here’s my main point: “The lesson is that parties need some sort of politicised cleavage in order to prosper – something that makes a certain group of voters look around for an identifiable party that will solve a problem or represent its concerns. Yet what divide or cleavage does TOP represent? Certainly, none of the traditional demographic or social divides. [caption id="attachment_16685" align="alignleft" width="229"] Gareth Morgan, founder and former leader of The Opportunities Party (TOP). Image sourced from Wikipedia.org.[/caption] In fact, Morgan, and now Simmons, have taken a clear opposition to such divides, especially in terms of the traditional left-right spectrum, with the stated intention of putting the party right bang in the centre, and willingness to work in coalitions with either Labour or National. This centre-party strategy is fine if TOP can position itself as representing something else as well. It simply isn’t enough to just build a party on the basis of having more “common sense”, or the ambition to hold the balance of power – as the example of United Future shows. Unfortunately for TOP, there simply isn’t a political divide in New Zealand based around ‘evidence-based policy’.” Gareth Morgan himself has explained again this week what the party stands for, saying TOP’s differentiation from other parties is, “Evidence-informed policy developed by experts” – see Dan Satherley’s The Opportunities Party lives on, with new leader Geoff Simmons. And in terms of its policy focus, Simmons has pointed to TOP’s emphasis on “taxation, cannabis legalisation, affordable housing and environmental protection.” These might all be good policies for voters to examine, but there is no particular constituency that these naturally appeal to in large enough numbers to create a successful party. The most likely demographic for TOP to successfully target might be youth. As I explained in an article by Jean Bell, “One of [TOP’s] key campaigning areas is… running this line that there’s been some sort of generation theft or generational bias to the [Government’s] current policy settings” – see: TOP set to pull youth voters, says political commentator. However, TOP seems intrinsically opposed to targeting and tailoring its policy prescriptions to any particular group interests. New leader, Geoff Simmons is especially against what he sees as divisive politics, and he wants TOP to be more of a party of unity and commonsense than difference, which can be seen in his opinion piece published today in The Spinoff – see: The demonisation of TOP 2.0 is political tribalism at its worst. Simmons says the politics of division and nastiness “will not be how TOP works on my watch”, and “The whole point of the Treaty is that Aotearoa New Zealand is a place where people talk about their differences, rather than fight.” He concludes his article emphasising that “TOP will talk to anyone” and “we are all in this together.” Could TOP chase the “woke vote”? Under the leadership of Gareth Morgan, TOP was associated more with social conservatism than any kind of “political correctness” or social liberalism. Largely this was down to controversial statements on the campaign trail about “femo-fascists” and “lipstick on a pig”. What’s more, in calling last month for expressions of interest to take over TOP, Morgan tweeted that “Identity politics fans need not apply”. He elaborated on what he meant by this, saying “Other agendas, such as promoting the identity (or sector) politics of socio-economic status, gender, environment, ethnicity, alone wouldn’t qualify” – see Jenée Tibshraeny’s Gareth Morgan happy to fund a TOP successor, but warns the leader would be ‘personally liable’ if they didn’t implement all his policies. Morgan’s communication adviser, Sean Plunket, was also associated with a more socially conservative approach. And this week, Plunket has written his analysis of the potential and problems for TOP going forward, in which he seems concerned about the party going down the route of political correctness: “There is a real risk TOP will be captured by those who practice the politics of identity and political correctness, ground already well occupied by Labour and the Greens. TOP’s policies aren’t predicated on restoring karmic balance to the universe, just some sensible changes that deliver more equity for society as a whole, particularly for younger New Zealanders” – see his Facebook posting: The Challenge for TOP. Nonetheless, focusing on winning over a more socially liberal base might be naturally attractive to the fledgling party. As I write in my Newsroom column, “Simmons is clearly more liberal than Morgan. And the milieu that he inhabits is more likely to push TOP towards the ‘woke’ side of the culture war. Although the ‘woke vote’ is probably already sewn up by Labour and the Greens.” There are a number of high-profile people who might be more attracted to such a party, especially with Gareth Morgan leaving the leadership. For example, columnist Lizzie Marvelly wrote last month how much she lamented what had happened to TOP, and said the party had a lot of appeal otherwise – see: Gareth Morgan’s political party was a missed opportunity. Blue-green Green killers Most commentators have identified the “environmental vote” as the most likely one for TOP to successfully chase. And this week Geoff Simmons has even characterised his party as a “blue-green” one. So, as Liam Hehir says, the Greens are the potential losers from the resurrection of TOP: “If TOP threatens anyone now then, again, in theory, it will be the Greens. The parties already had quite a bit of overlap. Led by Simmons, it should zero in on the same set of upscale liberal target audience. In the last public poll, the Green Party had the support of about 6 per cent of voters. If TOP does well then it just might just snaffle enough of those voters to reduce the Greens below 5 per cent. That would really threaten the coalition Government.” And Toby Manhire reports that at the last election there “was a good bit of disquiet, if not alarm, from with the Greens during the campaign of the potential for a well-oiled, focused, evidence-led and environment-conscious party to poach from the Greens’ urban voting base” – see: TOP is not dead after all, and Simon Bridges is pretty damn happy about that. But in the end, Manhire says that “Between them, Sean Plunket and Gareth Morgan did a sterling job of sending liberal urban floating Greens fleeing back to the mothership.” In 2020, it might be different, with the Greens at risk of dropping below five per cent: “the possibility of the Greens going underwater is salivating: it would bump the Nats’ parliamentary allotment close to a majority. There’s a long way to go, but a plausible TOP is a boon to that cause. It may be the only way a mateless National can win.” Rightwing political commentator Brigitte Morten also thinks the Greens should be worried: “The people who may be most concerned by TOP’s resurgence are the Greens. In their announcement, TOP highlighted two policy areas which may attract Green voters – cannabis legislation and environmental protection. These could be particularly attractive to those voters who feel isolated from the more socialist rhetoric of the Greens’ left led by Marama Davidson” – see: TOP’s resurgence: What are its prospects? Finally, although there has previously been an exodus of some of the more liberal activists in TOP, it will be interesting to see if they start returning now that Gareth Morgan has given away the leadership. One to watch will be Jenny Condie who famously fought against Morgan in 2017, leading him to label her a “pain in the arse”. And recently she told her side of the story – see: TOP could’ve been so much more than Gareth being Gareth.]]>

Bryce Edwards’ Political Roundup: Why Gareth Morgan’s TOP failed

Bryce Edwards — Fri, 13 Jul 2018 01:39:53 +0000

Bryce Edwards’ Political Roundup: Why Gareth Morgan’s TOP failed

[caption id="attachment_13635" align="alignright" width="150"] Dr Bryce Edwards.[/caption] There was always a big problem with The Opportunities Party – no one really knew what it stood for, and no one really knew what type of voters it was appealing to. Yes, it claimed to exist to promote “evidence-based policies”, but to some extent all parties say this and it’s simply not a compelling enough reason for voters. In terms of its target voter, TOP itself didn’t seem to know who it was trying to appeal to. Even Gareth Morgan seems to admit today on Twitter that he and deputy leader, Geoff Simmons, differed in who they were focused on: “Geoff’s interest was always only in millennials, the children of the urban property-owning elite who hang out at universities. Mine is more in working class people who are underpaid while the urban elite is protected from the tax break on income from owner occupied property”. The bigger problem was that many conservatives saw the party as politically “liberal” and many liberals saw the party as “conservative” – partly because it tried to be all things to all people, and hence failed to be anything very clear at all. Or as Liam Hehir puts it, TOP was “Too woke for talkback town, too talkback for woke town” – see: TOP, we hardly knew ye. Hehir elaborates on this liberal-conservative confusion: “What was TOP’s constituency? Where was its power base? It was a populist movement whose leader displayed disdain for the stupidity of common voters. It was an anti-establishment party that was going to rise up against the entrenched way of doing things from its base in, er, bureaucratic Wellington. It railed against personality driven politics while earning free media on the basis of celebrity.” This ideological confusion was there, Hehir says, from its very first day: “The muddled waywardness of TOP was there at its inception. Immediately following his announcement of the party, Morgan compared himself to Donald Trump. Then he took that back and said distanced himself from Trump. Finally, he said he was a bit like Trump. This was all at the same press conference, by the way.” Perhaps the lesson is that TOP was attempting to be a populist party in a country where there is currently little appetite for any sort of anti-Establishment political movement. This is the message of Giovanni Tiso’s blog post, Don’t let the garage door hit you. Tiso explains that the modus operandi of Morgan: “was to follow the playbook of the likes of Berlusconi, Trump and other contemporary populists. Beginning with chapter one, which instructs to seek controversy, always, in order to monopolise the news cycles and bamboozle the political debate.” However, the problem is those voters who might be interested in such a populist message seem to have departed from active participation in the political system: “the victims of our economic system are also largely excluded from the democratic process: so populists simply have no-one to appeal to – at least no-one who can be relied upon to vote. These are the very same conditions that stand in the way of genuine progressive alternatives.” Credit is given by Tiso for TOP’s taxation policies: “TOP was the only party that sought to shift the balance of taxation away from wages and towards capital, including capital tied in real estate. That Labour and the Greens have abandoned any serious attempt to shift this burden – or even admit, in the face of record level of unaffordability, that lower house prices may be a good thing – is one of the New Zealand left’s most enduring shames. And if there is a useful challenge to carry forward from TOP’s failed experiment, it should probably be this.” Tiso also criticises Morgan for simply not having the patience to progress his policies, which is what is normally required by new political formations. This is also the main point made by blogger No Right Turn, who says “Morgan’s biggest problem is that he is impatient” – see: TOP and the politics of impatience. No Right Turn makes the argument that other small parties like the Greens have played the long-game, and have ultimately been successful in bringing about some major changes. Here’s his main point: “Building consensus behind policy and changing political priorities requires time and patience. It requires convincing people. Morgan didn’t have patience, either for the process or with the people he was trying to convince. And that is why he was doomed to failure.” Claire Trevett’s obituary for TOP makes a similar point, saying the party “stood a chance of getting somewhere had it persisted. It was no mean feat getting to 2.4 per cent less than a year after setting up and in an election in which support for the smaller parties was squeezed by the juggernauts. Parties generally build over time unless there is a lightning rod issue to elevate them” – see: The slow, sad demise of Gareth Morgan’s TOP. [caption id="attachment_16685" align="alignleft" width="253"] Gareth Morgan, leader of The Opportunities Party (TOP). Image sourced from Wikipedia.org.[/caption] Morgan himself is aware of this problem and seems aware of his own impatience, saying, “to change the voting public’s political priorities requires a massive investment of time – time that individuals who have other options might more productively apply on other projects” – see his interview with Duncan Greive: ‘I enjoyed pissing off the flakes and groupies’: Gareth Morgan on TOP, RIP. The same interview has plenty of other nuggets from Morgan on why the party failed. For example: “Our market research analysis indicates that policy is of minor interest to all but a small subset of the voting public, that in essence there is a massive Establishment party inertia, which in part explains why the policy differences between Labour and National are so minor, even trivial. The way I’d express all that is that the electorate is too fat, content and complacent to respond to radical policy change”. Morgan also explains some of the decision-making that led to him calling it quits, essentially saying that the party failed to find a new leader to replace him. This point is elaborated on by Sean Plunket in an opinion piece yesterday: “Since the election Morgan has attempted in several different ways to transition the party from the perceived rich man’s hobby to a more sustainable and less dictatorial organisation. A new high-profile leader was recruited, and work was proceeding to launch him and TOP.2 early next year. It was that individual’s decision to pull out of the role, made for totally justified personal reasons, that was the final nail in TOP’s coffin” – see: Is The Opportunities Party over? Presumably, the new leader who was supposed to take over from Morgan was Lance O’Sullivan. Plunket also announces that he’s very keen to keep TOP going, lamenting that Morgan has unilaterally killed off the party: “If TOP had any semblance of membership-driven authority that wouldn’t have been his decision to make alone. Those who were inspired and motivated by the type of politics TOP sought to promote now have a clear choice. They can revert to picking from the established political players and cynically write-off TOP as the cat man’s pet project, or pick up the torch and give it another crack.” Deputy leader Geoff Simmons has today published his own account of the party’s demise, and also seems interested in keeping the project alive: “A new party was never going to immediately upset the cosy grip of the Labour/National cartel over our parliament like Gareth wanted to. It is pretty clear that was an unrealistic goal, given that two thirds of NZers vote pretty much automatically for the same party every time. This is frustrating because those two parties are actually the closest to one another on policy. Breaking this cosy cartel is a very long term game and will probably require some kind of crisis to break established patterns. However, we learned that making an impact and coming close to getting into Parliament is doable. Now we just need to build on that” – see: What I learned from Gareth Morgan and the TOP adventure. Simmons sees major change is likely to occur in New Zealand politics and society: “Given the global trends, it looks like some sort of policy revolution is inevitable. The current system isn’t working. The only question is whether it we can make it a revolution for good, or let it descend into a Trump-style kickback that makes things worse.” There seems to be a consensus that TOP’s demise is another warning sign that the New Zealand party system is in danger of getting too small. As No Right Turn says, “it means we’ll be down to only 12 registered political parties (and only 5 in Parliament). Which isn’t a lot of options for voters to choose from. One way of measuring the health of a democracy is by the number of registered political parties. And on that metric, ours seems to be in slow decline” – see: TOP-less. This issue is examined in much more detail in Claire Trevett’s column (The slow, sad demise of Gareth Morgan’s TOP), which outlines all of the other small parties on the “scrap heap”. She laments that New Zealand voters are less interested in ideological diversity: “In New Zealand the diet is more restricted, perhaps by common sense or indifference as much as population size. But the diet is at risk of getting too bland if fringe parties fall by the wayside completely and NZ First or the Greens suffer the same fate as other minor parties have in government. Should the pool of parties shrink further, there will inevitably be calls to revisit the 5 per cent threshold required to get into Parliament.” But perhaps it’s simply a problem with “parties set up by moguls”, says Peter Dunne, who catalogues all the other parties led by business people that have failed to last, concluding: “The common threads of all these moves are that political parties formed and funded by wealthy business leaders do not last, because those who form them quickly lose enthusiasm for the vehicle they have established and invested so much of their own capital in when they fail to get a sufficient return at the next election. The art of politics is, after all, vastly different from the world of the business takeover, and success in business is no assurance of success in politics” – see: Another National ‘mate’ burns out. Some similar points are made by Brigitte Morten, who says that “vanity parties” are inherently unstable and unable to sufficiently incorporate their supporters: “Vanity parties generally start with a bang and fizzle out quickly. This is because there are not solid foundations to the party. A wealthy or charismatic leader starts a party based on their own view of the world, it does not come from a group of people with a shared view of the world. People generally join political parties because they want to be heard, want to have a say on policy and want to have a sense of ownership of making it better. A party built around a dominant central figure – like Gareth Morgan – fail to provide people in the long term with that ability” – see: TOP demise shows fate of vanity parties. There is now some attention being focused on what future political parties might arise, and where TOP’s supporters might go – see Alex Braae’s With TOP gone, where will the protest vote go next? And some of the existing political parties will be keen on soaking up some of that 2.4 per cent TOP vote – see Sophie Bateman’s David Seymour appeals to Opportunities Party voters while holding cats. Finally, one of the potentially bright lights that has come of the demise of TOP is a new think tank set up by a number of former party candidates, such as Jenny Condie and Jessica Hammond – you can find out more at their Civic website and their Facebook page.]]>