Phil Goff says he will stand down on December 13. I think he is doing that int eh hope that the special votes don’t follow the rest of the voting public and by some miracle he can claim a victory from 27%.
Phil Goff has announced he will resign as Labour Party leader on December 13.
Candidates – including MPs David Cunliffe, David Parker, David Shearer, Grant Robertson and Nanaia Mahuta – are in the fight to take his place.
In an address from Parliament this afternoon, Mr Goff said he would be moving to a back bench role in Parliament in the wake of Labour’s crushing election defeat to National.
His deputy leader Annette King will also resign.
Mr Goff said his departure was the first step in rebuilding the flagging Labour Party fortunes.
I think Labour will now have a rather nasty, personal factional fight on their hands. If Parker’s behaviour in this battle in anyway mimics his nastiness in Epsom then there will be blood for sure.
Chris Trotter too seems to be hinting at a greater malaise within Labour than the facade they are currently showing.
Labour’s dramatic debut on the hustings in 1919 ushered in a decade and a half of extraordinary political turbulence that only ended with the Labour Party victory of 1935 and the creation of the National Party the following year. The 2011 general election result suggests that New Zealand may be about to re-enter the sort of agitated political air it last encountered in the 1990s.
The difference, this time, is that the turmoil within the party system is not being driven by the sound of ideologies clashing (or crashing) as they were (and did) in the days of Roger Douglas and Ruth Richardson. This time it is the absence of strong ideological themes in our domestic politics that is generating the instability – especially on the centre-left.
What does Labour really stand for in 2011? It most certainly does not stand for the socialist aims and objectives proclaimed by Harry Holland’s Labour Party in 1919. Indeed, two of the most important policies promoted by Phil Goff’s Labour Party in 2011: the introduction of a Capital Gains Tax; and lifting the age of eligibility for superannuation from 65 to 67; could just as easily have emerged from a moderate conservative party.
