The Post: The narrow path the left can tread that should lead to success

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This week, a left-wing agenda for the next election began to coalesce.

Item one, Labour’s proposed tax on property investment income, was impossible to miss, its announcement the culmination of two years of fevered speculation and heated debate.

Item two, the Council of Trade Unions’ New Deal for Workers, went largely unnoticed – except by my fellow columnist Max Harris, in Friday’s paper – but was just as significant in its own way.

Alongside something old – a demand for Labour to actually deliver its long-promised Fair Pay Agreements – the unions are asking for something new: a provision that, in workplaces covered by a collective agreement, any new hire is automatically enrolled in the union, while retaining the freedom to opt out.

This move, long promoted by Waikato University’s Mark Harcourt, would act as a “nudge” towards union membership, pushing back against the 40-year squeeze on wages that has seen a growing proportion of corporate revenue taken by owners instead.

If the share of revenue going to workers had remained at its 1980s level, the average wage would be a startling $14,000 higher. The decline of union membership has been central to this sad story.

A more egalitarian narrative, however, can be pieced together from this week’s announcements. A left-wing government, if successful next year, could shift the economy’s rewards away from property speculators and towards people working in productive ventures and vital public services.

More export earnings could be generated via Labour’s Future Fund tech start-up investments. That wealth could then be distributed more fairly through widespread union membership and Fair Pay Agreements that raise the “floor” of terms and conditions across whole industries.

Problems with public services, and the cost of living, could be at least partly addressed through Labour’s Medicard proposal for free GP visits.

Many questions remain unresolved, of course. Raising just $700m a year, Labour’s small-scale capital gains tax won’t generate the revenue needed to fully repair public services or repay the billions of dollars National took from working women’s pay equity claims.

Unresolved, too, is perhaps the biggest issue of them all: when one lifts one’s head from the policy detail, can a wider vision for the country be discerned?

Next year the left, in its usual way, will not lack for policies. This week’s announcements can be readily augmented with the Greens’ free dental for all, guaranteed minimum income, and comprehensive emissions reduction plan. Te Pāti Māori, assuming it’s still a functional entity, will throw more ideas into the mix.

What, though, will be the thread running through all these ideas – the vision that depicts a better world, gives coherence to disparate policies, and conveys something immediate to time-poor median voters?

Some would argue that a lack of political ambition, from Labour in particular, will neuter any attempt to construct such a vision. But modest aspirations may actually be a good fit for the times.

Unless one can turn out vast numbers of current non-voters – something the left spent part of the last decade trying and failing to do – elections are largely won in the middle. The shift away from the two main parties, now attracting less than two-thirds of the electorate, doesn’t change the fact that Labour needs to poach votes from National.

And those voters are not in the mood for soaring rhetoric. The Ardern years, now remembered – rightly or wrongly – as being characterised by vaulting ambition and precious little delivery, have cured them of that.

I’m told that, at the last election, a non-negligible number of voters didn’t believe Labour could deliver even something as modest as free dental care for the under-30s. There’s probably a parallel here with Jeremy Corbyn’s experience in the 2019 British election, when many voters felt that his vast array of manifesto pledges – including free broadband for every man, woman and child in the UK – was simply implausible.

That’s not to say that people don’t want hope. They do. But the centrist public, ground down by the cost of living and generally in a foul mood, is suspicious of anything that seems too good to be true.

And because the shift to the wings is happening with equal force on both sides – ACT and the ‘culture wars’ faction of New Zealand First rising, while the Greens and Te Pāti Māori do likewise – the centre hasn’t moved all that much. It’s grumpy, but isn’t in the mood for ideologically driven change.

Polling suggests most people don’t want to pay more tax in order to tackle child poverty or climate change. And only 2% of swing voters, according to analysis by The Post’s Henry Cooke, want further progress on Treaty issues.

That doesn’t mean Labour should offer nothing. The promised change does have to be big enough to seem meaningful – just not so big as to be implausible.

What one might call the narrow path, to be trodden carefully while offering neither too little nor too much, remains open. It is paved, however, not with grandiose visions but with hope that is grounded – hope people can believe in, hope they can touch and feel.