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Tory Whanau is going to lose the next election.
Between an utterly despicable campaign of misogynistic, racist abuse from the right, and her own self-sabotaging, near-100% track record of letting down the predominantly left wing voting base who elected her whenever it’s come to issues of actually doing anything, it’s pretty much already over. While the things I’d like to say to Sean Plunket and his ilk are probably best described as “legally actionable,” I don’t think we’ll really have much to mourn in the departure of our Tory-by-name-and-by-nature mayor. There is no part of her track record of corporate capitulation, austerity and asset sales that is really remotely progressive. The recent fiasco with the Airport was reprehensible neoliberal bullshit. Add that to allegations heard from a number of Trade Unionists that she treated a well-meaning, grassroots union response to the sale with scorn (and, on occasion some utterly childish verbal abuse). Consider the bizarre corporate welfare programme that was the Reading Cinema farce. The long-term-plan’s total submission to right wing austerity logic. The district plan’s utter submission to the whims of landlords and property developers. Show me a single material policy from Tory Whanau’s time as mayor and I’ll show you a bleak, neoliberal, anti-democratic, means-tested (and oftentimes remarkably mean-spirited) approach to local government that serves only the capitalist class at the expense of the workers, the impoverished and the marginalised. Personally, all I’d really like to say to her is “good riddance”, but we may well have plenty to mourn in the election of whoever replaces her. The problem is the same one we had in our last general election and the same one that’s being mirrored in so many elections around the world right now. The only choices we are presented with are between a supposedly “centre left” option that fails to address any of our society’s increasingly undeniable material issues–but may occasionally say the odd nice thing about one minority group or another–and an increasingly far-right option. As it becomes more and more clear that the centre cannot hold and the option presented by the status quo candidate is really no option at all, things become pretty predictable. The latter option of course promises to change everything for the worse in every conceivable way, but it at least promises to change something. Whanau was elected as a left-wing, progressive option. She appeared to say most of the right things and her election was celebrated by a lot of us, myself included. Now, as a mayor who continues to be Green-aligned and seems to want to maintain an air of progressivisim (in spite of her actual politics), we’re faced with the serious risk that, come the next local election, she’ll be the only viable option besides a right wing freak like Ray Chung. The left can argue (and we will, oh god we will) about the validity of the ballot box as a revolutionary (or even reformist) tool on a national level. That’s a different conversation and one that’s been had far too many times for a repeat to be relevant here. When it comes to matters of building power locally and empowering impoverished and working class communities, local elections can really matter. In the right moment, they’re a place the left can achieve some excellent short term wins with which to build from. More to the point, they’re also an avenue through which right wing and capitalist interests have captured more or less complete power over our city. That’s why you’re paying $270 a week to live in a mouldy shoebox and your landlord can do pretty much whatever the hell he wants to you. It’s why council housing is being left to rot and farmed out to a “definitely-not-a-corporation” community housing provider just like the National Party wants to do to the whole of Kāinga Ora. It’s also why virtually every socialist and trade unionist submission to the council’s recent long term plan was able to be dismissed by a neoliberal mayor, and why you might soon have to start paying a French corporation for your drinking water. Local elections really do matter for left wing causes. It’ll get so much worse if the local elections next year see us forced to make a choice between Tory Whanau (who, again, IS GOING TO LOSE THE NEXT ELECTION) and whatever dead-eyed sociopath the right wing line up behind. We on the left need to make sure this doesn’t happen by rejecting the options as presented to us and building an alternative option. We don’t want or need a green-party-endorsed “lesser of two evils” mayor who’s best promise is a complete lack of change instead of a bad one. We need a Union-endorsed (and, more to the point, Union accountable) one. We need to rally around a serious left-wing candidate who can promise real, sorely-needed change in our city. Someone who will promise to empower working people and represent working people’s interests, rather than the all-powerful “Small businesses” and property developers like Ian Cassels. Someone who will pursue a program of intensive new public housing construction to address our housing crisis and improve council funding through obvious solutions like charging landlords commercial rates rather than harebrained investment schemes and self-perpetuating loops of asset sales. I’m not here to write a list of speculative and randomly-chosen names of potential political leaders. That’s always stupid. Rather to say that Wellington’s left–in particular our brilliant local trade unionists and socialist activists who fought a commendable battle against the airport sale–need to have a serious conversation about where to go from here. Tory Whanau is finished and we will find no viable political solution in the ranks of the Green Party. We need a new option. |
Author
Pat Biss |