For the first time in history, the Trotskyist movement is
standing a candidate in a New Zealand general election. The
Socialist Equality Group (SEG) is fielding Tom Petterson
because the working class confronts a crisis of historic
proportions, and because no party contesting this election
offers it any way forward.
Our campaign is not a bid
for office within the existing order. It is an intervention
to expose the bankruptcy of every party of the capitalist
establishment, and to raise the necessity of a socialist and
internationalist leadership of the working class.
We
call on workers and young people to support this campaign,
and to register to attend our public meeting on November 1,
at 1:30 p.m. in the Dowse Art Museum (James Coe Centre), 45
Laings Road, Lower Hutt. Register here: https://shorturl.at/D8tjl
This
election is taking place as world capitalism enters the most
dangerous period since the Second World War. The economic
crisis that erupted in 2008 was never resolved and has
intensified following the COVID-19 pandemic. The ruling
classes of every country have responded with a relentless
assault on the living standards of working people, the
promotion of far-right and fascist forces, and the drive to
violently redivide the world.
The fronts of a third
world war are opening before our eyes: the US-NATO war
against Russia in Ukraine, the genocide in Gaza, the
criminal and expanding war against Iran, the seizure of
Venezuelan oil and the militarisation of the entire
Indo-Pacific in preparation for war against China. The
danger of nuclear war is a real and present one.
Advertisement – scroll to continue reading
At
the same time, the working class is fighting back. Mass
strikes and demonstrations by youth and school students have
erupted in France, millions are protesting against the
housing crisis in Spain, and strikes are unfolding across
the United States and throughout the world.
New
Zealand is no exception: Last October more than 100,000
teachers and healthcare workers took part in the country’s
biggest strike in nearly 50 years against the government’s
attacks on wages and conditions—a struggle which was
strangled by the union apparatus.
What is lacking is
not the capacity of the working class to fight, but a
leadership with the program necessary to unify workers
internationally against the source of austerity and war. The
trade union bureaucracies, the social-democratic parties and
the pseudo-left “socialist” groups all function to
subordinate the class struggle to the interests of the
bourgeoisie. The building of a new, revolutionary leadership
is the central question of the epoch.
New Zealand: A
minor imperialist power
New Zealand presents itself
to the world as a kinder, gentler capitalism, a model of
egalitarianism and decency. This is a fraud. New Zealand is
a minor imperialist power, which, together with Australia,
seeks to corral the Pacific Island nations behind the war
drive of US imperialism against China. Successive Labour and
National-led governments have called for the New Zealand
military to be made “combat-ready” to join a US-led war
far beyond its territory. Wellington and Canberra have
agreed to uphold the ANZUS Treaty, which would automatically
drag both countries into a US war against China. The
Pacific, which experienced some of the most devastating
battles of World War II, is again being turned into a
staging ground for imperialist war.
Within New
Zealand, the ruling class presides over some of the sharpest
levels of inequality in the developed world. One in five
children lives in poverty, 10 percent of people rely on
foodbanks to survive and more than 112,000 people are
homeless. While workers’ real wages have plummeted by 6.4
percent since 2021, the number of billionaires has doubled
in the past eight years and the size of their fortunes has
grown enormously. The National Business Review Rich List now
records more than $129 billion in the hands of just 150
individuals and families—more than a quarter of the
country’s annual GDP. This is not an accident of policy.
It is the product of the capitalist system itself, which can
only enrich the few by impoverishing the many.
We
say: No money for war!
- End all military
spending and redirect billions of dollars to schools,
hospitals and ending poverty. - Withdraw from the Five
Eyes intelligence-sharing network and close the Waihopai spy
base. Abolish the intelligence agencies. - Abolish the
ANZUS Treaty and end all military alliances and agreements
with the US, Australia, NATO and elsewhere. - Withdraw
all New Zealand troops from the Middle East, Europe and
every overseas deployment.
Labour and
National: Two parties of war and
austerity
Governments led by National and
Labour have supported US imperialism at every turn. The
current National-led coalition has deployed military
personnel to the Middle East to assist the US attacks in
Yemen and in keeping supply lines open for Israel’s war
machine. The previous Labour-led government sent New Zealand
troops to train Ukrainian conscripts in Britain to fight in
Russia—a deployment that has since been expanded to Poland
as the war escalates and threatens the use of nuclear
weapons.
Labour agrees with National that military
spending must increase dramatically—from 1 to at least 2
percent of GDP—and that recruitment must expand. This will
be funded by starving healthcare, education and other vital
public services.
This election will resolve nothing.
All the political parties contesting it—Labour, National,
and all their support parties—are committed to defending
capitalism, which requires a deepening assault on the
working class and the integration of the country into US
imperialism’s war plans. The differences between the
parties are minor and tactical. A vote for any of them is a
vote for austerity and for war.
The previous
Labour-led government, under Prime Ministers Jacinda Ardern
and Chris Hipkins, is directly responsible for the coming to
power in 2023 of the right-wing coalition of National, ACT
and NZ First. In 2017 Ardern formed a coalition with the
Greens and the right-wing nationalist NZ First, appointing
its leader Winston Peters as deputy prime minister and
foreign minister. It was the Ardern government’s attacks
on living standards, anti-immigrant measures and
strengthening of military ties with Washington, which
prepared the ground for the current right-wing
government.
Ardern’s promises in 2017 to address
poverty and inequality were a fraud: Under her government,
homelessness and the number of children living in material
hardship increased. The working class turned against Labour,
which lost the 2023 election in a landslide, as real wages
plummeted and as the government dismantled public health
protections against COVID-19, leading to a surge in
hospitalisation and death.
The Labour Party ditched
any attachment to reformist policies during the 1980s
government of Prime Minister David Lange and Finance
Minister Roger Douglas, which carried out a brutal assault
on the working class, similar to that by Reagan in the US
and Thatcher in Britain. It responded to the globalisation
of production by privatising industries, removing state
subsidies, sacking tens of thousands of workers, and
slashing taxes for the rich. All these attacks were enforced
by the Stalinist-led union bureaucracy. The result was
soaring social inequality and unemployment—a social
disaster that continues to this day.
After decades of
right-wing attacks, Labour and National are both widely
despised: Their combined support has fallen to less than 60
percent, the lowest level since the 1930s. This mirrors the
collapse in support for social-democratic parties
internationally, including in France, Britain and Spain, and
represents a serious crisis of rule for the bourgeoisie that
has relied on these parties to contain and suppress the
class struggle.
To return to power, the Labour Party
will have to form a coalition with two or three minor
parties, and will rely heavily on the support of
middle-class, pseudo-left groups.
To defend living
standards, we call for:
- An immediate 20
percent pay increase for all workers, and a rise in all
benefits, to reverse years of real wage cuts. Index all
wages and benefits to the cost of living, with automatic
monthly adjustments. - A full-time, permanent job on
decent wages for all who want one; a living income for those
unable to work. - Cancel student debt and restore free
tertiary education. - Free, universal healthcare;
reverse the slashing of health and education workers’
wages and the sacking of thousands of public
servants. - To carry out a real struggle against wage
cuts, job losses and the militarisation of society, workers
must rebel against the trade union bureaucracy. The unions
ceased to be workers’ organisations decades ago and now
function as an industrial police force for the state and big
business. Workers must build rank-and-file committees,
democratically controlled and independent of the union
apparatus and the capitalist parties. These committees must
unite workers in New Zealand across all industries and with
workers in Australia, Asia, the Pacific and throughout the
world, through the International Workers’ Alliance of
Rank-and-File Committees.
The Greens,
Te Pāti Māori and the Opportunity
Party
The Green Party and the Māori
nationalist Te Pāti Māori (TPM) are positioning themselves
to provide a “progressive” veneer for a right-wing
government led by Labour. Both parties will ditch their
meagre reform proposals—including calls for the rich to
pay more tax and for measures to improve
“affordability”—the second they enter a coalition with
Labour.
In the Ardern government, the Greens loyally
backed Labour’s budgets, which boosted military spending
while starving education, healthcare and other services. TPM
was part of the 2008–2017 National Party-led government
which increased GST, slashed welfare entitlements and
partially privatised electricity companies.
The Greens
and TPM, along with the pseudo-lefts, promote reactionary
forms of identity politics based on nationality, race and
gender, which divides the working class and obscures the
most important division in society: the gulf between workers
and capitalists. TPM speaks for Māori tribal-based
capitalists seeking a greater share of the wealth extracted
from the working class. Their interests are opposed to those
of Māori workers, who are among the most exploited in the
country.
The Opportunity Party (TOP), which says it
could work with either Labour or National, could hold the
balance of power and choose which of the main parties leads
the next government. TOP, which has not been in parliament
before, claims to be “pragmatic” and “centrist.” In
fact it is a right-wing, pro-business party which, like the
Greens, peddles the fraud that climate change, the housing
crisis and soaring living costs can all be resolved within
the capitalist market system.
Unite the working
class
- Reject identity politics and the
parties that peddle it. The fight against racism and all
oppression requires the unity of workers across ethnic,
gender and national divisions—not their subordination to
competing sections of the capitalist elite. - Defend
immigrants—full citizenship rights for all; end the
deportations and repeal all anti-immigrant
measures.
The role of the
pseudo-left
The pseudo-left groups, particularly the
International Socialist Organisation (ISO) and Socialist
Aotearoa (SA), play a key role in enabling Labour’s
betrayals. Both groups whitewashed the right-wing Ardern
government as “reformist” and are again calling on
workers and youth to vote for Labour or its allied parties,
based on the lie that they are a “lesser evil” or even a
progressive alternative to National.
In response to
the war against Iran, SA and the ISO both called for an
“anti-war” alliance with the pro-imperialist Labour and
Green parties. The ISO and SA are not socialist
organisations but nationalist groups operating within the
political establishment and the union bureaucracy to disarm
workers and subordinate them to parties of big business and
war. The pseudo-lefts speak for affluent middle-class layers
whose privileged position rests on New Zealand’s role as a
US-allied imperialist power.
A socialist program of
action
The demands we have set out cannot be won
through appeals to the capitalist state but pose the need
for a political fight against it. Every one of them collides
with the profit system and the parties that defend it. The
fight for them therefore raises, at every point, the
question of which class holds power.
The wealth of the
country—including the $129 billion in the hands of 150
families and the $39.5 billion in bank profits between 2020
and 2025—was created by the working class and must be
taken back. The banks and major corporations must be
nationalised under the democratic control of the working
class, and the wealth of the billionaires seized. This
requires the working class to take political power—to
break up the existing state machine and establish a
workers’ government that will reorganise society to meet
human need.
What the working class lacks is not the
capacity to fight, but a revolutionary leadership. The
building of that leadership—the New Zealand section of the
International Committee of the Fourth International, the
world party of socialist revolution founded by Leon
Trotsky—is the central task.
Tom Petterson is
standing in this election to fight for this program—to
build the independent political movement of the working
class.
Vote for Tom Petterson in Hutt South.
Attend our public meeting on November 1. Join the Socialist
Equality Group—for the revolutionary unity of the working
class in the Pacific, in Asia and throughout the world. For
world
socialism!
