Lest We Forget . . .

Obsequious, Adoring and Useless

This is the state of the current NZ Labour Party, according to one of its stalwarts, Chris Trotter. 

Mr Shearer inherits a party in which rank-and-file members have sunk to the level of what one wit describes as “MP fan clubs”. At its upper levels, the party is caught in the grip of a sclerotic, self-selecting oligarchy based in Labour’s insular and largely unaccountable sector-groups. In effect, Mr Shearer’s Labour Party is rapidly disabling itself. His first and most urgent priority is to kick it back into life.

This, more than anyone else, is the legacy of Helen Clark.  She represented capture of the party by left-wing academics, career bureaucrats, homosexuals, and unionists. Most of them had never done a day's work in the real world in their lives.
It recruits its MP's through the "youth wing".  It grooms them, soirees them, feeds them, sends them to various confabulations of  the Socialist International, and panders to their egos.  Then it selects them as MP's and tries to ram them down the throat of the electorate.  They spend most of their time paternalistically telling voters how they understand them, feel for them, stand up for them--but failing to connect because the electorate senses the disingenuousness.


According to Trotter the Labour Party's membership has consequently fallen to around 6,000--just slightly more than the Greens.  It has no money--not surprising really. 

Let's never forget that this is why Clark pushed so hard--even to the point of breaking the law--to ensure state funding of political parties.  That move, had it been successful, would have ensured the Labour elite's control of the party and possibly government in perpetuity, funded compulsorily through the taxation system.  It's the only way Clark knew how to operate.  If money did not come via the state, she was totally at sea, lost, adrift.  It was all she and her cosseted colleagues knew and know.  Rarely--if ever--have we seen such naked self-interest pursued so ruthlessly and illegally. 

Thankfully, the common-sense of the "man in the street" found this kind of behaviour odious--which is why the "common man" was despised by Clark and her ilk as an ignorant, brutish bum. 

Can the new Labour leader, Shearer revitalize the Labour Party?  Unlikely.  He, himself, is a perpetuation of the same elite--having been employed by the UN for years.  He is an insider in culture, experience, and mentality.  It is highly unlikely that he will have the necessary perspective to take the axe to his own Party in order to revitalise and rebuild it.  Were he to attempt such a heroic task, his greatest enemies will be his cosseted parliamentary colleagues and their adulating staffs.