Opportunity Cost

Labour’s repressed desire and the rise of the political decaf

Back in 2017 I wrote a grumpy article for The Spinoff. Accurately titled “The ‘no fault’ fallacy: Looking back at our 18 months of ACC hell”, you can probably guess at the source of my grumpiness. Spoiler Alert - I beat ACC, though it took another four years. I am stubborn. In that Spinoff article I was a little mean to the then sitting Minister of ACC Iain Lees-Galloway:

The current minister, Iain Lees-Galloway, responded to Sir Geoffrey Palmer’s call by saying we need to have “considerable public debate” and “total political consensus” before extending ACC. Personally I think some political backbone would be useful too.

Probably not the best way to win friends. After all Iain was operating then under the closeted tutelage of the Labour Party hierarchy and history. And pervasive silence on ‘the ACC issue’ was a feature of successive New Zealand governments since it was first introduced in 1974. Don’t mention causation!

Iain completely redeemed himself in his farewell speech to Parliament in August of 2020 when he correctly explained that maintaining a two-tier health and welfare system separated by what caused the need was “impossible to justify”. No shit. That said, it is amazing how long we can we can justify the impossible isn’t it? 2026-1974 = 52 years and counting.

Iain Lees-Galloway is now the general manager of the Opportunity Party, currently polling at 4.6% in the June 1News Verian survey and sitting a rounding error away from the 5% threshold. The bloke who spent his ministerial years dutifully reciting Labour’s formula for not doing things (”considerable public debate,” “total political consensus”) named the impossibility on his way out the door, and now works for the party that is collecting on everything Labour (and National) has spent decades not doing. Or as Simon Wilson puts it neatly:

These days, it’s almost as if National and Labour have conspired to undo our confidence in the mainstream.

Yep. So here is my prediction, so you can laugh at me in November. Labour will keep shedding voters to Opportunity between now and the election. The mechanism driving the transfer is structural rather than circumstantial, which means it will keep operating no matter what Hipkins announces, and it is this same mechanism that will carry Opportunity over the line and establish it as a durable political force. My argument is psychoanalytic, because the polling data only tells you that voters are moving. It cannot tell you why these voters, from this party, to that one. For that I need the theory.

The numbers, such as they are

Nobody has yet published definitive evidence showing individual voters walking from Labour to Opportunity, but the picture has been filling in with some rapidity. Start with movement, which is lopsided. In the June Verian poll Labour dropped five points, from 37 to 32. National dropped one. Opportunity rose 1.3 to a record 4.6, and the Greens rose two. The two old parties together held 61% of the electorate, their lowest combined share since 1996, the year MMP arrived. The bleeding seems to be coming mostly from one side of the ledger, and the buckets catching it belong to the Greens and Opportunity.

The profile evidence points the same way. Danyl McLauchlan has described Opportunity’s base as educated and informed, the sort of voters who read the policy documents and agonise about wasting their vote. Demographically speaking, that is the professional-managerial core Labour has spent twenty years cultivating and taking for granted. The party leader, Qiulae Wong, is contesting Mt Albert, the seat of Helen Clark and Jacinda Ardern and the most Labour seat in the imaginary geography of this country, and senior press gallery figures have openly floated a Labour accommodation there, Epsom style. Nobody muses about gifting Mt Albert to a party that is harvesting National’s paddock. And of course there is ex-labourer Iain, running the shop.

The RNZ-Reid Research poll put Opportunity at 4.7 percent, its highest result in that series, a doubling of support since the previous edition, and the second consecutive poll to place the party within touching distance of the threshold. Two polls from two different pollsters saying roughly the same thing makes a trend rather than a rogue number. More useful for our purposes, RNZ asked voters whether they would prefer a Labour-led or National-led government, and among Opportunity supporters the answer was lopsided: 41.1 percent wanted a Labour-led government against just 21.3 percent for a National-led one, nearly two to one in a poll where the wider electorate split far more evenly. Another 38 percent of the party’s voters answered “neither” or “don’t know”, well above the baseline, which tells you something too. These are voters who have detached from the major-party question altogether. Labour’s own supporters can smell where this vote came from; nearly half of them believe Opportunity would side with Labour as kingmaker, while only an eighth expect the opposite. Even Luxon’s attack line, that a vote for Opportunity looks like a vote for Labour and the Greens, concedes the premise.

Wong, for her part, insists her voters’ preference “doesn’t drive our decision making”, and that the party will negotiate with the largest party first. Behold the structure of disavowal. A party built disproportionately from Labour-leaning voters, managed by a former Labour minister, assures the country that the Labour-shaped desire of its own base will play no part in its choices. We will meet this move again below.

What Labour repressed

To see why these particular voters are moving, look at what Opportunity is selling. The centrepiece is a Citizen’s Income of up to $370 a week, roughly $19,400 a year, means-tested away above $350,000, replacing the main benefits and eventually superannuation, funded by a land value tax. The party reckons seventy per cent of New Zealanders come out ahead, twenty break even, and the top ten per cent pay: the large landholders, the land bankers, the portfolio class.

Where have we heard this desire before? Not the specific tool, but rather the wish it answers, the wish to finally tax the unearned, to break the property machine, to fund security out of rent rather than wages. Labour’s own membership has voiced this wish for a generation. And the party seemingly has organised its institutional conduct around leaving that wish unsatisfied.

For evidence here I point to the Cullen Tax Working Group: commissioned, delivered, but then buried. The capital gains tax: promised but then abandoned, with Ardern’s extraordinary supplement that it would never happen while she was leader. This locates the prohibition in her as a person rather than in any circumstance; her leadership becomes the guarantee of the not-happening. Then the wealth tax work done quietly inside Treasury under Robertson: leaked and subsequently disowned. And the 2020 outright majority, the only unconstrained parliamentary term any party has held in the MMP era, lost to time. The desire was never enacted, it was technocratically administered. Labour have become like fusion spruikers, fundamental tax reform is perpetually ‘just around the corner’. Readers of my ACC writing will recognise the pattern, because “considerable public debate” and “total political consensus” are the same ritual in a different portfolio. Don’t mention causation. Don’t mention the property market. The party has a well-worn groove for knowing things it cannot allow itself to act on, and 52 years of ACC silence tells you how deep that groove can get.

Let’s get some theory into this. Lacan’s hysteric puts a brutal question to the master: you say this is what you want, so why does everything you do guarantee you never get it? Labour’s professional base has been asking some version of this since roughly 2011. For a long time the question had nowhere to go. The Greens were available but carried their own costs, too radical for the KPMG liberal, too identitarian for others. Then a party turned up offering the repressed content itself: the land tax, the universal payment, the actual redistribution of actual rents. And the transfer began. Opportunity isn’t stealing Labour’s voters so much as returning Labour’s desire to them in the form of a potential coalition partner.

The form of the return: redistribution, decaffeinated

However, this explanation is a little too obvious for me. And this is where Žižek and his genius reading of ideology earns its keep, because content alone doesn’t explain the building enthusiasm. If these voters simply wanted redistribution, the Greens have a wealth tax sitting on the books. What Opportunity offers is redistribution in a very particular form, with the antagonism surgically removed.

Žižek’s famous catalogue of decaffeinated products (coffee without caffeine, beer without alcohol, war without casualties) describes commodities that let us enjoy the thing while being spared its Real. Opportunity has produced the political equivalent: class war without a class enemy. A land value tax is a declaration of hostilities against the rentier bloc. There is no way to transfer billions from landholders to everyone else without taking sides. But the party’s entire discursive apparatus exists to make that taking of sides unsayable. The party is “not left, not right.” It is “evidence-based.” The tax policy was, Wong assures us, developed over a decade by multiple economists, so knowledge speaks here, never desire. Wong herself carries the message perfectly: a KPMG consultant, formerly of B Lab, fluent in stakeholder capitalism, promising to negotiate first with whichever major party wins. Winston Peters sneered that Opportunity is a party of consultants, and not unusually for Peters the insult is more analytically precise than anything the commentariat has yet managed. In Lacanian terms he has named the university discourse, knowledge installed in the agent’s position, it is the modern mask of the old master.

For the ex-Labour voter, this packaging is the entire product. The professional-managerial subject genuinely wants the redistribution, has wanted it for twenty years, but cannot avow the wanting, because avowal would mean accepting that politics is antagonism, that their gain is someone’s loss, possibly their parents’ loss, possibly (given who owns what in Grey Lynn and Mt Albert) their own loss on the family home. Opportunity resolves the deadlock artfully. You get to vote for the land tax while telling yourself, and your dinner table, that you are following the evidence (you probably are). The transgressive enjoyment survives intact while responsibility for it gets outsourced to the literature. Labour voters are moving because of the technocratic wrapping, which lets them want what they want without having to know it. Luxon, trying to wound, said Opportunity wants to turn every New Zealander into a beneficiary. For this electorate he could hardly have written a better advertisement. They already know that the largest cost on the government’s books is the rapidly growing number of beneficiaries aged 65 and over.

So we have a theory: Voters have migrated from a party that names the antagonism and cannot act on it (Labour), to a party that would definitely act on it but has made it unnameable (Opportunity). Nobody in this arrangement traverses any fantasy. The voter isn’t cured; but the symptom has found a more comfortable (musical) chair.

Why the bleeding continues, and why it consolidates

Now the most important point, which is the basis of the prediction. Labour cannot win these voters back with policy, because any policy it offers gets discounted by its own case history. Twenty years has taught its electorate, correctly, that a Labour promise of tax reform is a promise about a promise. When Hipkins rules things in or out, his base hears it the way the psychoanalyst hears the obsessional’s latest plan to obtain ‘the thing’, as one more instalment of the deferral. The signifier “Labour tax policy” no longer refers to any future state of the tax system. It refers to the deferral itself. That is a symbolic mandate exhausted, and no comms strategy repairs it. I say this as the child of two teachers, themselves children of working class families from working class towns. True Labour.

Meanwhile every point Opportunity gains dissolves the one rational barrier to further gains, the wasted-vote calculation. McLauchlan identified the trap: this educated electorate hates wasting a vote, so Opportunity needed to look viable before it could become viable. At 2%, defection was irrational. At 4.6%, with the June poll all over the bulletins, defection is nearly rational, and each defection makes the next one more so. The wasted-vote trap does not degrade gracefully. It flips. Once past the tipping region, the same reflexivity that kept the party out for a decade works entirely in its favour, and on all the evidence above, the marginal voter it converts is standing in Labour’s column.

The likely November outcome, then: Opportunity crosses the line substantially at Labour’s expense, and New Zealand acquires a permanent parliamentary lodging for the desire Labour could not house. Opportunity’s mechanism will still be there in 2029, because Labour’s obsessional structure will still be there in 2029. Fifty-two years of ACC silence should tell you something about the half-life of a Labour repression. I wonder how many Labour MPs will take the Opportunity to switch parties sometime in the next four years?

A disclosure, by way of conclusion

Perhaps I should declare my own position, since autotheory is my bag and the analyst who pretends to sit outside the transference is the worst kind of Freud fraud. I find myself, uncomfortably, inside Opportunity’s target demographic. More uncomfortably still, I totally endorse the castration their signature policy makes. My politics, if it needs a label, is pro-enterprise and anti-accumulation: for profit in the classical sense, the return on making, risking and working; against rent, the return on merely holding. This is the old distinction, George’s, and before him Smith’s and Ricardo’s, which a century of property inflation has trained New Zealanders to foreclose, it is the precondition of the national property fantasy. In Lacanian terms it maps onto something like the difference between desire and drive. Enterprise is lack metabolised into production, a circuit that makes something and moves on. Rampant accumulation is the capitalist discourse proper, the closed loop Lacan sketched in Milan in 1972, surplus-value functioning as surplus-jouissance, a circuit that rejects castration and therefore just cannot fucking stop. Blatant land banking is about as ‘drive’ as anything, value extracted from the refusal to do anything at all with the object. A land value tax, on this reading, amounts to a symbolic castration of the rentier position: finally the imposition of a limit. Imagine the trauma of the ‘mega-landlord’ being publicly castrated in the form of house price deflation as his renters become their owners. I love this for us.

So yes, I am for the cut. What I refuse is the fantasy in which the cut is being sold, the fantasy that there exists a place outside ideology, a consultant’s chair from which the spreadsheet speaks and nobody has to want anything. There is no such chair. The evidence never speaks; someone speaks the evidence into existence, and the claim to be merely transmitting the evidence is the oldest trick in the master’s repertoire. Do not accept this from anyone, ever. Opportunity’s deepest appeal to the ex-Labour voter was never really the $370 a week. It is the promise of finally being governed by knowledge, after six years under a party that knew exactly what it wanted and also could not bring itself to want it. That promise is ideological, as all promises are.

In terms of who to vote for? I defer to Simon Wilson who really hits the nail with the basics:

Party vote for the party that wants what you want.

Sage advice, now I need to figure out what I want?