With Labour registering over 50 percent voter support in opinion polls, party leaders hope the early poll will see it returned to office with an increased majority, enabling it to govern on its own. Throughout its past term, Labour ruled in coalition with the Alliance Party and with the support in parliament on confidence votes of the Green Party.

The early election, and the prospect of Labour governing with a stable majority, have been largely welcomed in ruling class circles. Support in the polls for the opposition National Party, the capitalist party that has governed for most of the post-World War II period, is running at a historic low, half that for Labour. National is considered to have little prospect of being able to form an alternative government.

Prior to Clark’s June 11 announcement, speculation that she would call an early election had been mounting following a split in the Alliance Party and growing conflict with the Green Party.  
 
Schism in Alliance party
The schism in the Alliance unfolded in the wake of the imperialist intervention in Afghanistan. While the party’s members of parliament (MPs) voted with Labour to commit New Zealand military forces to the aggression, many Alliance members wanted it to take more distance. As the party’s parliamentary leader and the deputy prime minister James Anderton sought to rein the party in behind him, further conflicts emerged over whether the Alliance would campaign in the election, upholding the record of the Labour-led government or would seek to assert a more independent image.

Anderton and fellow Alliance cabinet minister Matthew Robson split to front a new party for the election campaign, Jim Anderton’s Progressive Coalition, pledged to being part of a reelected Labour Cabinet.

The Alliance elected another outgoing Cabinet minister, Laila Harre, as its new leader. It is unlikely to win any seats in the coming election.

Government conflict with the Green Party also heightened in the wake of the imperialist assault on Afghanistan, which the party’s MPs voted to oppose. The rift sharpened in May when the Green Party declared it would refuse to continue to guarantee confidence to an incoming Labour-led government unless a moratorium banning the introduction of genetically modified food crops and other organisms into New Zealand was extended for a further three years. The moratorium is due to expire late next year.

Labour won election in 1999, following nine years of National-led governments. It pledged to break with the "free market" policies pursued by both Labour and National over the previous 15 years, under which the employers waged a deep-going assault on the working class.  
 
Inroads against working people
In office, the Labour-Alliance government has held back from initiating major new assaults on the social wage, or similar anti-worker measures, and has implemented some modest reforms that benefit working people. These include the repeal of the antiunion Employment Contracts Act.

At the same time, the coalition government has acted to advance the interests of the New Zealand capitalist class, resisting calls for further pro-worker reforms, standing firm against union wage demands, and aggressively pursuing the interests of New Zealand imperialism abroad. The New Zealand rulers have collaborated with their traditional allies in Washington, London, and Canberra to send armed forces to intervene in East Timor and Afghanistan. The government has also made significant inroads against workers’ rights since September 11, boosting the powers of the police and spy agencies and introducing new "anti-terrorist" measures.

Labour’s course, and its popularity in the polls, reflects the fact that it has been in office during the strongest upturn in the business cycle in a decade, especially in agriculture, which is at the heart of capitalist profit-making in this country. Official unemployment is set to dip below 5 percent for the first time since 1988. "When you have a tailwind, politics is easy. The test of us all is how we respond when there’s a headwind," noted former National Party prime minister Jennifer Shipley on her retirement speech from parliament June 13.

In part the upturn is the result of higher prices on the world market for dairy, meat, food crops, wool, timber, and other commodities exported from New Zealand, combined with a low exchange rate for the New Zealand dollar against other currencies. More fundamentally, it is built on the inroads the rulers have been able to make into the incomes, union organization, and social wage of working people over the past 15 years.  
 
Productivity drive
An illustration of this is the large Kinleith pulp and paper mill in the central North Island town of Tokoroa. It is said by its owner, Carter Holt Harvey, a subsidiary of International Paper, to be one of the world’s lowest-cost pulp producers.

In 1989 the mill employed 1,100 workers and manufactured 400,000 metric tons annually. Today it employs 545 workers and produces 575,000 metric tons. Moreover, in March, the company announced that a further 200 jobs at the mill would be scrapped and another 190 handed over to a private contractor.

The ongoing erosion of the social wage is producing mounting crises in health and education, which affect not only working people but broad sections of the middle classes also. A recent survey revealed that 30 percent of children live below the poverty line.

In response to these conditions, resistance among working people has been growing. The weeks leading to the election have seen strikes and other actions by high school teachers and students, and by nurses and other health care workers, demanding improved wages and more funding of health and education. In the Northland town of Kaitaia, thousands of angry residents took to the streets to force the government to intervene to restore hospital services cut by the local health board.

Other actions have included protests by Maori against the construction of a new prison in Northland at Ngawha. Immigrants have challenged the government’s policy, introduced after September 11, of routinely detaining asylum seekers, leading to a June 27 High Court ruling declaring the policy illegal. And prisoners have taken action through the courts to protest brutal conditions they face in jails.

Voting takes place under a system of proportional representation known as MMP that was introduced in 1996. Electors get two votes, one for a candidate to represent the electorate they are registered in and one for the party they wish to govern.

Since the 1930s governments in New Zealand have been formed outright by either National or Labour. Labour is a social democratic party formed by the unions early last century, although few unions retain formal ties to the party today. Under MMP both parties have had to negotiate coalitions with smaller parties in order to form governments.

Three other parties are likely to hold blocks of seats in the new parliament--the Green Party, the Act Party, and New Zealand First.

The Green Party is a bourgeois party which to date has cast its policies to the left of Labour. Previously part of the Alliance, it stood as a party in its own name for the first time at the last election in 1999. In addition to opposing genetic modification, the Greens advance various nationalist and protectionist policies and so-called "ecological" taxes.

The Act Party is a right-wing big-business party. It calls for continuing "free market" policies, proposing new inroads against the social wage and reduced taxes. It has been campaigning for tougher "anti-crime" measures and for an end to government compensation to Maori for the loss of land and resources since colonization. Maori are the indigenous people of New Zealand.

New Zealand First is a rightist party led by Winston Peters. Peters calls for slashing what he calls "out-of-control" immigration, identifying his stance with the recent rightist election campaigns waged by Pim Fortuyn in Holland and Jean-Marie Le Pen in France. He scapegoats immigrants, especially from Asia, for pressure on jobs, schools and health services, as well as for overcrowded roads and housing, and other pressures on infrastructure.

Peters is also campaigning for tougher "law-and-order" measures and against what he calls the Maori "grievance industry."

The Communist League is standing two candidates in the election, Janet Roth, a meat worker, for the electorate of Maungakiekie in Auckland and Baskaran Appu, a sewing machinist, for Christchurch Central. For the party vote, and in other electorates, it is urging a class vote for the Labour Party, as the party founded historically by the trade unions, and against the outright capitalist and rightist parties.

Michael Tucker is a clothing worker and member of the National Distribution Union.  
 
 
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