New Zealand Labour Party feud over candidate selection
By
John Braddock
27 February 2017
A bitter feud has erupted inside the Labour Party over the “parachuting” of former Alliance MP Willie Jackson into the candidates’ list for the September general election. Jackson, who is Maori, was seeking to re-enter politics via the right-wing Maori Party before being recruited by Labour leader Andrew Little.
In New Zealand’s electoral system, there are two ways of entering parliament: by winning an electorate, or via the party lists from which seats are allocated according to each party’s overall share of the vote.
Little offered to place Jackson high enough on the list to give him a good chance of entering parliament. Labour’s ruling council promptly granted Jackson a waiver from the rule requiring any candidate to have been a party member for at least a year.
The move provoked opposition inside Labour, particularly from those concerned that it would undermine the party’s gender quota policy, aimed at ensuring 50 percent of its MPs are women after this year’s election.
Christchurch MP Poto Williams issued a statement denouncing Jackson, principally on the basis of an interview he conducted on his radio program in 2013 with a teenage victim of sexual assault. Labour Youth members circulated an open letter citing this and Jackson’s anti-gay slurs. Former MP and ex-party president Maryan Street expressed objections over the downgrading of “hard working” female candidates.
Pro-Labour commentators from the trade union-funded Daily Blog, however, rushed to defend Little and Jackson, accusing their opponents of jeopardising Labour’s election prospects. The blog absurdly couched the conflict as a case of “identity politics” versus “class politics.” Editor…