The Labour Party needs the rock of good policy, writes party member Harry Love in an open letter to party members and affiliates.
WE are about to vote for a new leader of the Labour Party: exactly what is being voted for and why does it matter?
The answer to the first part is a credible Opposition and a potential future government.
And for the second part because, like it or not, the Labour Party is the only credible major opposition party.
The Green Party has probably reached its peak, a fact which should focus the minds of Labour supporters on their political responsibilities.
The recently announced review of the September massacre will no doubt be informative, but a little late for decisions which must be made in a week or two and of little use if the wrong decisions have already been made for the wrong reasons.
Some brief analysis, therefore, seems appropriate.
Why did it happen? In the presidential-style election that the zeitgeist (and the media) demands, the leader of the Labour Party was never going to win.
This is not an attack on David Cunliffe but, in spite of his untiring efforts, the anecdotal evidence of animus against him among Labour voters, unfair or not, is overwhelming. Hence the split votes in Labour constituencies.
There is, of course, more to the election result than this but, arguably, the personality-focused contest and the side issues that reinforced it shaped the outcome. What then are we left with?
For the first time in a couple of decades the Labour Party has something it lacked - a solid and coherent foundation of social and economic policy.
The last Labour Government, with its strategy of not frightening the horses, was perhaps more notable for what it did not do than for the few things it did.
The difference was highlighted in an Otago Daily Times post-election editorial which noted, with an air of mild surprise, that the Labour Party was slaughtered in spite of its ''superior policies'' (an endorsement not to be sniffed at).
It is therefore argued by some that policies were irrelevant to the outcome of the recent election - the voters neither noticed nor cared.
The Government, they say, was re-elected with hardly a policy to be seen, aside from a few election tit-bits.
True, and such policies as it has were certainly not going to be revealed in detail before an election.
Two of the candidates for the Labour leadership have responded to this situation by suggesting that the policy platform be dropped, not least because the hoi polloi don't understand the complicated bits, like capital gains tax, for example.
This rather patronising view has a weakness aside from its implicit insult, and does precisely what a Government wants an Opposition to do; to be reactive, have no clear common set of values and policies, and to open up the fissures for factionalism.
It is the kind of interest-group policies that arise from this condition, not broad, inclusive social and economic policy, that make a party unelectable.
It follows, ineluctably, that the person who so lucidly articulated the Party's policy platform on the couple of occasions the media allowed during the election campaign should have the job of continuing to articulate it and to focus the minds of his colleagues on the one thing the Party has going for it.
As far as the present Government is concerned, the air is already redolent of stuff floating about, looking for a fan to hit. That's when the rock of policy will matter.
-Harry Love is a Dunedin resident.
