Is the New Zealand Labour Party fundamentaly a conservative party?

[Secretary of State Liberal Hack]

I'm wondering if the Anglospheres most successful Labour party is only successful because at its heart it is a conservative party. For example they support the traditional power of Maori Chiefs and are opposed to Asian immigration along with official multiculturalism that is championed by the center-right leading to them loosing Asian voters by landslide amounts. They depend on the votes of wealthy homeowners who depend on a property bubble to keep aflost and hence refuse to impose any capital gains tax.

Is their success due to being a conservative party ?

[CumbrianLefty]

No, hth.

[Estrella]

I'm wondering if the Anglospheres most successful Labour party is only successful because at its heart it is a conservative party.

What is even the threshold for calling a centre-left party conservative at heart?

For example they support the traditional power of Maori Chiefs

That is because they have a Mа̄ori vote bank and not for any ideological reasons, and it's not like any voters care about it.

are opposed to Asian immigration along with official multiculturalism that is championed by the center-right leading to them loosing Asian voters by landslide amounts.

Labour's opposition to immigration is overblown - IIRC they only wanted to keep the overal level stable and increase the refugee quota. Multiculturalism isn't a political issue in NZ and nobody really talks about it. As for Asians - look at, say, Canada: Liberals are the party of official multiculturalism and yet Conservatives still win the Asian vote. Any conservative party that clears a certain low bar of not shouting crude racism from the rooftops (i.e. not GOP, but even then) will do very well with Asian immigrants for cultural reasons.

They depend on the votes of wealthy homeowners who depend on a property bubble to keep aflost and hence refuse to impose any capital gains tax.

Wealthy homeowners have always voted National and poor people vote Labour, even poor young people - IIRC from an exit poll, both National and Green vote among the youth is correlated with wealth. There indeed isn't a capital gains tax, but there is a replacement of sorts where money from investment properties is taxed as income - a measure that directly targets property speculators.

tl;dr no.

[Estrella]

Also, this may be a hot take, but there is an ostensibly progressive party in Anglosphere that would be appropriately titled fundamentally conservative. It's not just the typical "campaign on the left, govern on the right" thing that they do much more than NZ Labour, but the fact that they represent The Establishment in a way that their right-wing opponents don't and arguably never did.

[Samof94]

Also, this may be a hot take, but there is an ostensibly progressive party in Anglosphere that would be appropriately titled fundamentally conservative. It's not just the typical "campaign on the left, govern on the right" thing that they do much more than NZ Labour, but the fact that they represent The Establishment in a way that their right-wing opponents don't and arguably never did.

Yeah. How does this compare to Trudeau’s party.

[Estrella]

Related:



lol

[Secretary of State Liberal Hack]

Related:



lol

I mean political compass is a joke, but the NZ labour party has been conservative in some aspepcts they refused to even take a postion on legal marrijuna officaly during the referedum

[CumbrianLefty]

Related:



lol

Political Compass still had UK Labour to the right of the BNP in the Miliband era. Nuff said.

[If my soul was made of stone]

Related:



lol

Political Compass still had UK Labour to the right of the BNP in the Miliband era. Nuff said.

Bob Katter, noted acolyte of Third International Theory.

[Pericles]

No it's not, NZ Labour has consistently moved policy to the left in government though of course a lot of people (sometimes myself included) would like them to go further. It's clear that Labour MPs and party leaders have the same basic left-wing values as any other Anglosphere left-wing party.

I'm not sure how supporting the rights of indigenous people is a right-wing policy. The context of this is that in 1840 the British government signed the Treaty of Waitangi with the Maori, which promised them continued sovereignty over their land. The breach of this Treaty is a big reason why Maori have such worse social and economic outcomes than Pakeha/NZ Europeans, and so it's right that we apply the principles of the Treaty so we can start upholding our obligations under it. Plus, this has evolved to be a bipartisan consensus.

The NZ Labour Party has moved on from policies like a capital gains tax not because it doesn't believe in them, but because it is making that sacrifice to win elections. Having lost 3 consecutive elections before the u-turn and clearly underperformed in the 4th (2017) compared to how they would have done if they hadn't left themselves vulnerable to tax scaremongering, and given the polls were actually close in 2019, the u-turn was an obvious choice politically (policy wise it was regrettable). NZ Labour right now is doing so much better than other Anglosphere left-wing parties, so it looks right now like their approach is a good one. Plus, New Zealand doesn't have much of a mood for radical change or populism-most people are happy with the direction of the country (the polling data on this question is very different to countries like the US), satisfied with democracy, and New Zealand didn't get damaged much by the GFC. So politically, New Zealand is still fine with third way politics and in some ways stuck in the 2000s. This doesn't mean Labour is 'at heart' conservative. Jacinda Ardern explicitly said she believes in a capital gains tax when she pledged never to implement one due to public opinion, and Grant Robertson clearly was very passionate about undoing the 1991 Mother of All Budgets.

Meanwhile, Labour has moved economic policy to the left in many other important ways-such as raising the minimum wage, expanding sick leave, extending the bright-line to 10 years so there's a quasi-capital gains tax on investment properties, undoing the cuts to welfare benefits in the Mother of All Budgets, increasing the top income tax rate to 39% and now  instituting sector-wide Fair Pay Agreements so that trade union power increases and the effect of the Employment Contracts Act is reduced. As you'd expect, Labour has been bolder once they won a majority-both because they can worry less about losing the next election and because NZ First is no longer there stopping left-wing policies from getting a majority in Parliament.

The obvious and simple answer is that Labour is a left-wing party that has policies applied to the NZ context rather than theories based on what other countries experience, and they are political pragmatists that want to be electable and keep power.

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

I'm wondering if the Anglospheres most successful Labour party

Tbh NZ politics has become very personality based in recent years - NZ Lab's success basically amounts to Key retiring and being replaced with a wet sock, and Labour installing Jacinda over its previous revolving door of union bureaucrats.

[jaymichaud]

No? They're pretty firmly centre-left.

[SnowLabrador]

Uh, no. Why would anyone think that?

[An American Tail: Fubart Goes West]

I'm wondering if the Anglospheres most successful Labour party

Tbh NZ politics has become very personality based in recent years - NZ Lab's success basically amounts to Key retiring and being replaced with a wet sock, and Labour installing Jacinda over its previous revolving door of union bureaucrats.

If Bill English is a wet sock, then what are his successors?

But yeah, I think that’s a very accurate description. Once Labour dumped Little, they shot up and that helped them get enough to cobble together a majority coalition with NZF and the Greens. 2020 was heavily influenced by how little NZ was affected by Covid thanks to strong leadership early on. 2023 should be interesting. I don’t see WINston pulling NZF out of the grave again. ACT’s continued high numbers are definitely interesting though. I mean, I know they usually do well when National is in the dumps, but this well?