Q+A: Labour leader Andrew Little interviwed by Corin Dann on TV One's Q+A programme

Labour Party leader Andrew Little told TV One’s Q+A programme once Phil Goff makes his decision to run for the Auckland mayoralty “it’ll have an impact on decisions I’ve got to make about, you know, things I’ve got to do with the Labour Party.”

“Phil’s certainly kept me in touch with his thinking and where he’s at. He’s committed to making an announcement by the end of the month,” he says.

When asked by political editor Corin Dann if he was comfortable with Mr Goff staying on as an MP when he’s running to be the mayor.

“Well, he’s not the mayor just by announcing it,” he replied

“He’s got a campaign to run. But he’s been elected to Parliament for a three-year term. He’s got responsibilities to Parliament.”

http://tvnz.co.nz/q-and-a-news/future-labour-party-andrew-little-video-6414040

Q+A, 9-10am Sundays on TV ONE and one hour later on TV ONE plus 1. Repeated Sunday evening at 11:35pm. Streamed live atwww.tvnz.co.nz

Thanks to the support from NZ On Air.

--

Q + A
Episode 37
ANDREW LITTLE
Interviewed by CORIN DANN

CORIN Andrew Little, welcome to Q+A this morning. Let’s deal with the breaking news this morning – Len Brown will not contest the Auckland mayoralty again. Your reaction initially to him – has he been a good mayor? Are you sad to see him go?

ANDREW Yeah, I think he has been. He had the difficult task of being the first mayor of the supercity. Big job to integrate what was really the administrations of five other councils. And I think he’s made a good start of it. I think, however, the events around the election and just after the last election meant that it was going to be difficult for him to continue, to be honest. Yeah. And I think, you know, all credit to him, he’s made a decision. I think it’s been the right decision for Auckland and leaves the way open now for a race.

CORIN Massive implications for the Labour Party. As we know, Phil Goff is going to run for the Auckland mayoralty. That is a pretty well-known fact. Well, let’s face it. He’s got David Lewis on board now. He’s got a team in action. It’s only a matter of time till he announces on November 22nd. What does that mean for you? Should he resign once he announces he is running?

ANDREW Well, Phil’s got to announce his decision. Phil’s certainly kept me in touch with his thinking and where he’s at. He’s committed to making an announcement by the end of the month. That’s what I’m expecting. I’m not going to pre-empt what that decision is. But obviously once he makes his decision, it’ll have an impact on decisions I’ve got to make about, you know, things I’ve got to do with the Labour Party.

CORIN In principle, though, are you comfortable with him staying on as an MP when he’s running to be the mayor?

ANDREW Well, he’s not the mayor just by announcing it. He’s got a campaign to run. But he’s been elected to Parliament for a three-year term. He’s got responsibilities to Parliament.

CORIN He’s hardly going to be focused on his parliamentary jobs, is he, if he’s trying to run for mayor?

ANDREW Well, if he’s got portfolios like Auckland Issues, then there’s a natural fit for that. So, listen, let’s see what his decision is, and I’ll make decisions as a consequence of that, once I know what it is.

CORIN Sure. I don’t want to dwell on it too much, but it of course would mean a by-election in Mt Roskill. Michael Wood is a name that’s been floated around as a potential candidate. Is he the frontrunner?

ANDREW Well, if there is a by-election, like all by-elections, we go through a selection process. And I think that what I’ve been very encouraged by in the last few months is the number of people coming forth from all parts of New Zealand, showing an interest and offering themselves as candidates for the Labour Party. So we’ll go through that process.

CORIN Because you lost the party vote there, didn’t you, in the last election?

ANDREW Yeah. I mean, we lost the party vote in a lot of electorates that we actually won. So this is the big challenge that we’ve had, is to rebuild the party vote. So let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves. We’ve yet to hear from Phil about his decision. He’ll make that by the end of the month. And then we’ll know and make plans for whatever the consequences of that are.

CORIN All right. Let’s move on to this conference. It seems like you’re sort of clearing the decks here. You’re dumping some old policy, clearing the way forward. But the one thing, I guess, that’s dominated in the lead-up to this has been the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

ANDREW Yeah.

CORIN Are you guys trying to have your cake and eat it on this policy? You’re sort of a foot in each camp. Where are we going with this? What’s the message to New Zealanders about the TPP? I know there are nuances. What’s the message? In or out?

ANDREW The TPP is here now. The National Government has signed us up to it. It’s not a question about for or against. It’s good or bad. And the reality is we are a party that supports free trade. We are a party that supports anything that opens our access. We need opportunities for exporters. The reality is that in the TPPA, there is at least one provision in it, and it’s the one that says that countries are now restricted in passing laws on land sales. That is of deep, deep concern, for two reasons – one is that New Zealanders are concerned about land sales in this country, and, in fact, we will legislate to restrict land sales. But the other thing is we now have an international agreement that we’ve signed up to that purports to put constraints on what our parliament can do. And the idea that in a Western democracy, in a parliamentary democracy, that a political party can enter into an agreement with other nation states to restrict what our parliament can do, that goes against every democratic principle that anybody knows. So we will fight tooth and nail to reject that and to resist it.

CORIN But you’re kicking it for touch, to be fair, because you can’t win on this. No matter you do, you’re going to upset some people in your party. The grassroots clearly don’t like it. There are others who see it as a necessary thing.

ANDREW The grassroots – and, actually, most New Zealanders – don’t like the idea that our democracy, our democratic institution, could be interfered with in this way. Now, we will campaign and fight hard on that issue. But fighting hard on that—

CORIN So why don’t you come out and say, ‘No buts, no ifs, we will vote against every bit of enabling legislation. We will fight this every step of the way’?

ANDREW Well, we don’t know what the enabling legislation will be. I mean, this is the thing.

CORIN But what does it matter, if you have decided from what you’ve seen of it that it doesn’t—? It cuts across sovereignty, so what does it matter what the technicalities of it are? You can just say, ‘Nope. We’re not going to have it.’

ANDREW Because when you look at the legislation that is likely to be required, it’s unlikely there’s going to be any legislation that will touch on that particular issue. But we’ll make the decision on how we vote on any legislation once we see it. And as we do with any legislation, the Caucus makes a decision on how they’re going to vote on it. But I can tell you now— And that’s why I think it is important to come back to the issue that people are concerned about it and where we stand on it, and the issue is about our sovereignty and our democratic institutions. And nobody can tolerate, I think, the idea that there is an international that cuts across our sovereign rights.

CORIN It’s important because I think people, after this election lost, they’re trying to get a sense of where Labour is. They’re looking around the world, and they’re seeing an impatient Labour movement, progressive movement, that has gone, ‘You know what? We’re going to stand on principle.’ In the UK, it’s about principle. They’ve gone—Frankly, they’ve gone, ‘Bugger the consequences of whether we can be re-elected. We’re going to stand strong on things like free education, nationalising railways, you know, raising taxes.’ Is that where Labour in New Zealand needs to go?

ANDREW Well, we need a set of policies that will actually deal with the issues that are current now. So we are a country where we have rising unemployment, we have a rapidly slowing economy, no investment at all. The Government is showing no interest at all, so that’s where we’re focusing our attention, and you’ll hear a reasonably modest announcement on that today. That’s where we’re going. Look, we’re a party—we’ve lost three elections in a row. We’ve got a declining vote, so we’ve got to look to that and work on—with that.

CORIN So you’re not going the way of Corbyn. Basically, that’s what you’re saying. You don’t see way of—that aggressive approach, where Corbyn has gone, ‘We are fed up with that softly, softly approach.’ You’re not going that way?

ANDREW Well, there are issues that Jeremy Corbyn is dealing with in the UK that don’t apply here. You know, we haven’t had the huge cutbacks—the mess of cutbacks in public services that they’ve had. That is not to say we haven’t had cutbacks. Of course we have. In health, we’ve lost $1.7b.

CORIN One of his big policies is free tertiary education, and I’m sure there’ll be plenty of people in your party which would support the move towards free tertiary education.

ANDREW Yes, so we’re a party that already, last in government, that took out the interest on student loans.

CORIN Could you go the next step? Could you imagine being in government at some point and going, ‘You know what? We will bear the cost of tertiary education, because it’s worth it for our country.’

ANDREW So, the challenges for us are—We’ve got real challenges in health. We’ve got real challenges in education – a big challenge in the primary and secondary end of education to upgrade our education system there too, as well as tertiary. Our future of work commission project that we’ve had in place now, it’s highlighted that issue. The reality is the way the world is going, and what people would need in terms of the education system—

CORIN This is the lifelong learning concept.

ANDREW Lifelong learning; easy access to it, and we can’t saddle people with debt for forever and a day.

CORIN So the question is would you then make that that free? Could you—Could we then see a future Labour Government that says tertiary education, lifelong learning, call it what you will, will be free. This is a fundamental principle. We’re seeing it—Bernie Sanders in the US, same policy.

ANDREW So, what we’re doing, the way we’re going about it is I could stand on high and say, ‘This is the way it is; this is the way it’s going to be.’ Actually, we’ve taken a different approach. The whole future of work commission project is about starting with some ideas but engaging with the public on it. We’re now at the public engagement process. Next year, you will see what, you know, the type of policies that we will put up that we’ll campaign on in 2017. We’ve gone a slightly different way than the Bernie Sanders and the Jeremy Corbyns.

CORIN Well, some might say—

ANDREW We’ve gone to the public to elicit, you know, where the issues are that they see and their expectations of that.

CORIN But do the people in your party – the grassroots, the progressive voters in New Zealand – don’t they want that boldness? Aren’t they fed up? How else are you going to change this situation of the 1% with all the wealth? I mean, how is it going to change unless you’re the ones putting up bold policies to change it? You can’t be National Lite.

ANDREW No, so we had a, you know, a pretty big task to do to recover from our election loss last year, and the priority—I’m a great person of doing things in the right sequence. The big issue we had was actually internal. We had to get our caucus focused, active, doing the right thing in an environment in which they can thrive. We’ve got some great caucus members doing some great things. We’re the party that was, you know, pretty much close to disarray – poor fundraising, poor organisation. We’ve been working hard on that. So you can’t—

CORIN The boldest of that—

ANDREW You can’t do the big ideas with a party that’s in disarray. You’ve got to get your party organisation sorted out. We’ve done that.

CORIN So what you’re really saying is you need to prove to the public, don’t you, that you can be a credible Government first before they will believe what you say.

ANDREW Well, we’ve got to prove that we can organise ourselves and function, you know, like a well-functioning party before we can then state, you know, ‘By the way, we’ve got these big ideas on this.’ You can’t do that until you’ve got your other stuff sorted out. So that’s the process we’ve been through.

CORIN But you’ve almost—you’ve dumped the capital gains tax, which would be one of the most crucial policies, wouldn’t it, for restoring this imbalance that people like Max Rashbrooke are saying that—you know, the inequality. You’ve dumped that, so that’s off the table.

ANDREW We’ve dumped after going to two elections with it and seeing a declining vote.

CORIN But you’re going to have to do something about tax on capital, aren’t you?

ANDREW The truth is, what we put up in a capital gains tax was too blunt. It not only affected the person with 14 properties in the property market—

CORIN Well, it’s a poison term, wasn’t it?

ANDREW But it also affected the hard-working middle-income couple who might have had one, maybe two, investment properties – that was their retirement scheme. And they thought, ‘Well, why are you coming after us? We’re not the big problem here.’ And they were right. So, we’ve had to kind of kick that for touch and say, ‘All right, we’re going to start again on that.’ We’re not going to go into 2017 with that in the manifesto, but we’ll have a look at the total tax system, because we want a tax system that’s fair. But my commitment is we won’t make any significant or material changes to the tax system until we’ve got a mandate from the people, so any idea we come up with we will take into an election, but we’re not going to go into 2017 with it.

CORIN Andrew Little, thank you very much for joining us on Q+A.

© Scoop Media