Restoring the status quo is not enough

Labour held its party conference over the weekend, and Chris Hipkins gave a speech promising to make the current coalition a one term government. Along the way he made some policy promises: restoring free prescriptions, resuming the Smokefree Aotearoa policy, restarting the build of Dunedin hospital, restoring state housing investment, reinvesting in new Cook Strait ferries, restoring public transport funding, re-enacting fair pay agreements. There was one new policy: ditching AUKUS (good). But almost all of labour's agenda can be summed up as putting things back the way they were before Luxon came to power. Or, to put it another way, simply restoring the status quo ante.

This is good and necessary, because Luxon has wrecked shit, and that needs to be fixed. But at the same time, its nowhere near enough. Because the pre-Luxon status quo wasn't exactly great - we had a climate crisis, a housing crisis, an inequality crisis, and Labour wasn't exactly moving fast on fixing any of them. We also had a government strangling itself with austerity, running down key government services out of a weird self-flagellating desire to meet arbitrary financial targets in an effort to appeal to people who would never vote for them, and who would accuse them of financial mismanagement and loose spending no matter what they did. And while Labour is talking about one of the big fixes again - a capital gains tax - they're still unclear on whether they want to actually do anything with the money, or just give it away in income tax cuts (in which case, sure, its a redistribution tool, but also makes you wonder what the fucking point is). And of course, they simply have no credibility on that issue, having promised and then backed away from it repeatedly, and there's no reason any of us should believe it will end any differently to the last time: in the party leader getting cold feet and swearing off actual effective change for the rest of their careers.

The core problem is that Labour seems to have no vision of what it actually wants, other than to be in power and get the big offices and big salaries and free limos again. It has a nostalgic vision of things being great when they were in charge, but nothing beyond that. Nothing they want to change. Nothing they want to do. Nothing they actually want to use power for, other than adding the letters "Hon" before their names.

And that is simply not enough. To point out the obvious, there are other opposition parties, who do know what they want, and are working hard to persuade us that we want it too. And a Labour Party which seems to want nothing beyond "put us in charge" deserves to lose to them. While good management is useful (just look at the current clown show), at the end of the day nobody fucking cares about managers.