Written By:
- Date published:
11:27 am, August 28th, 2025 - 30 comments
Categories: election 2026, labour, Left, Revolution, social democracy -
Tags: anger, french revolution, how change happens, michael joseph savage, rogernomics, ruthanasia, strategy, working class
Outrage is easy. Outrage feels righteous. But outrage without discipline destroys the very people it claims to save. New Zealand has tried revolutions before: Rogernomics, Ruthanasia. And forty years later, it’s workers, renters, and families still paying the bill.
If we want transformation that endures, we must build it brick by brick. Or watch it burn, again.
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If you can look at the state of this country and not feel tears of white-hot rage, you have no right to call yourself a New Zealander.
Wages stagnant. Rents obscene. Hospitals on the brink. Billionaires thriving while families are priced out of the suburbs they grew up in. This is not accidental; it is the direct result of political choices made over decades. You should be furious. I am furious. And anyone who isn’t paying attention should be.
But anger is not a strategy. Anger drives us, motivates us, sustains us. Anger fuels the fire. But fire alone does not build; it consumes. And right now, there’s a dangerous fantasy spreading on the activist left. A belief that because the contradictions of capitalism have sharpened so far, the old order will soon collapse, and all we need to do is hasten its fall.
It is the purest expression of dialectical materialism: that history moves forward through struggle, that every system carries within it the seeds of its destruction, and that crises create the opening for transformation. It is an intoxicating story. I understand its appeal.
So did the French in 1789.
The revolutionaries of Paris tore down a monarchy, remade a continent, and declared a new age of freedom. And for a moment, it worked. Then came the Terror, then came Napoleon, and within thirty years the kings were back on their thrones and Europe was drenched in blood. The revolution burned white-hot, but the fire consumed more than it saved. And who paid the price? Not the elites, who retreated to their estates and returned with their privileges intact. It was the peasants, the artisans, the working classes who bore the burden — taxed, conscripted, and sent to die in Europe’s endless wars while the old order quietly reassembled itself around them.
New Zealand has lived through its own revolutions, though we called them by other names. Rogernomics in the 1980s. Ruthanasia in the 1990s.
In less than a decade, the Fourth Labour Government set fire to the economic model of an entire country. Public assets sold, unions smashed, state houses gutted, protections stripped away: all with the promise that liberation was just beyond the pain. But the wealth didn’t “trickle down.” It gushed upward. Inequality exploded. Communities were hollowed out. And when Ruth Richardson arrived to finish the job, we were told once again that austerity would make us stronger, leaner, freer.
It didn’t.
It broke the working classes. Jobs vanished, wages stagnated, and generations were locked into poverty. Families lost homes. Rural towns died. Māori communities, already battered by colonisation, bore disproportionate harm. Meanwhile, the architects of the revolution: the bankers, the consultants, the ministers, prospered. The contradictions sharpened, yes. But the system didn’t break. It adapted. It consolidated. It survived.
And yet there are those now who would have us leap again — this time in the opposite direction, demanding immediate, sweeping redistribution on a scale unseen in our history. But revolutions do not happen in a vacuum. They happen in societies, and societies have memories, divisions, fears, and limits. Push too hard, too fast, without sequencing or consensus, and you provoke reaction — the same pattern, every time.
Passion without strategy is a trap. Speed without care is a trap. And when ruptures collapse, it is always the working classes who pay the bill.
The wealthy will be fine; they always are. They will retreat to their portfolios, their trusts, and their tax havens. It’s workers, renters, families, the very people we claim to fight for, who get crushed in the backlash.
Labour should know this better than anyone, because it has lived both sides of the lesson. It has seen what happens when you leap too far, too fast. And it has also seen what happens when you drift so aimlessly that voters no longer know what you stand for. Chris Hipkins’ Labour offered little more than managerial caution in 2023: promising nothing, defending nothing, inspiring no one. And voters ,rightly, walked away.
But Labour’s history carries another lesson. One the party has forgotten.
Michael Joseph Savage was a socialist. But he was also a pragmatist. He had big dreams for our country, but he had the discipline to see them become reality. He remade New Zealand one house, one law, one reform at a time.
Savage understood that quiet, moral courage achieves more than grand gestures or ideological purity ever could. He refused the temptations of the extremes, left or right, and built lasting change by carrying the country with him.
Savage didn’t define himself by his outrage; he defined himself by what he built. His government delivered state housing, universal social security, and expanded public services on a scale that transformed New Zealand. And he did it carefully, deliberately, successfully.
That is why his reforms endured where others have crumbled.
That is the model we have lost. And it is the model we must recover.
We do not need manifestos that promise everything, everywhere, all at once. We need firemen and builders, not arsonists. We need people willing to protect what’s burning, defend what’s left, and rebuild deliberately on foundations strong enough to endure. That means credible, sequenced reforms voters can see, touch, and trust: a tax system that closes loopholes for the ultra-rich while protecting the middle; a state housing programme so ambitious it would make Savage green with envy, restoring affordability for renters and first-home buyers alike; visible, measurable investment in health, education, and climate adaptation that ties change to results, not rhetoric.
That is not timidity. That is strategy. The alternative is to leap without a landing, to mistake catharsis for progress, and to hand the right exactly what it wants: a divided left tearing itself apart while Luxon, Seymour, and Peters entrench their vision deep into the bones of the state.
The contradictions are real. The anger is real. The stakes could not be higher. But the lesson of history; from Paris to Wellington, from 1789 to 1984, is that lasting transformation requires consent, legitimacy, and care. Revolutions burn bright, but they leave ashes in their wake. If we want change that survives the backlash, we must build it, brick by brick, with the fire of our anger but the steadiness of our hands.
Changing the government is not everything. But it is the foundation for everything else. Fail to win power, or squander it chasing fantasies, and we will be right back here a decade from now: poorer, angrier, and still bleeding from the wounds of experiments we never learned from.
Anger is the spark. But if we want change that lasts, we cannot afford more arsonists. We need builders.
In the words of the Prophet Springsteen:
"At the end of every hard-earned day people find some reason to believe" (Nebraska).
It is complacent to presume voter party loyalty if you don't give them something to believe.
In economic context New Zealand is much more similar to the UK than to Australia, and Starmer makes Hipkins look coherent and focused.
Capitalist economies are like badly-written software with long chains of dependencies and sub-dependencies, insufficient abstraction and bits tacked on by multiple, self-interested, individual actors over time. Software developers look at such systems and have nightmares – they can't fix anything without blowing up something else that can't be fixed without blowing up another thing, etc. They'd prefer just to start again and re-write everything – but there's never enough time, or money – what gets delivered is incomplete, is itself riddled with problems and disappoints just about everyone. Such failures breed conservatism and distrust within the organisation – a determination not to go down that road again, to stick with what (sort of) worked OK most of the time in the past. Rule no. 1 for the left should be "don't do dumb sh*t". Understand the fragility of the systems you want to change, and that this fragility is one of the reasons that they are so enduring. Map out the consequences of actions carefully, then manage and mitigate them. To make the lives of the bottom 80% of the population materially better, you will have to hurt someone, preferably those most able to absorb it, but don't hurt everyone.
Am a software engineer. Can confirm.
Yes, the complexity of "unintended events" on top of old ills, stretching the patches glitches and pipes
Devil in the detail.
Ardern came in after Key and English had Capital as their driving force.
She tried to replace that with Wellbeing and kindness as guides over 51/2 years.
Events got in the way.
1.2017 mycoplasma bovis
2. 2019Christchurch Mosque shootings.
3 Whakaari/White Island eruption deaths also 2019
4. 2020 first case in NZ of Pandemic Covid
5. Occupation of Parliamentary grounds for 23 days 2022.
6 end of the pandemic restrictions in NZ declared in Aug 2023, Ardern said her tank was empty she retired exhausted.
Amazing social progress was made in spite of all those events.
Over just 18 months this current government have undone most of that under urgency, while saying Labour spent too much!!
Conveniently ignoring those previous costly unprecedented set backs.
To quote Harold Macmillan "Events my dear boy events" or a Scottish poet Robbie Burns "The best laid plans o' mice an' men gang aft agley"
To quote our recent Labour Treasurer, "We have your backs", and so they did through all of that. They practiced Manaakitanga and put people first where ever possible.
This government has weakened our ability to respond with resilience by wrecking support systems. They must go in 2026 imo.
Savage is cited as the one responsible for the social good he did.
According to John A Lee, Savage was reluctant to go as far as he was credited. From memory (reading one of Lee's autobiographies) Savage opposed the raising of the pension and was out manoeuvred by his cabinet.
I say that to make the point, who are the reformers in the Labour front bench? Who are those who have been hurt by the system enough to be motivated to make the needed changes?
Parker was one but he couldn't tolerate the environment in Cabinet.
If Labour is committed to any type of DEI, then they need a few blue collar, calloused hands at the top tier.
Thanks for a great article, populism doesn't just exist on the right.
People who want revolution should remember it's other meaning is for something to travel in a cycle and end up at the same place,
If only Aotearoa NZ could cycle around to a MoW and a state housing boom – if only…
I think the OP is complacent to the point of having to check it for a pulse.
Here is a question – what is the size of Labour's (and Nationals for that matter) core vote now? That is important. How many loyalists has it got, people who year in year out vote for Labour? How many New Zealanders are tribally proud to identify themselves with the Labour party brand? Nothing tells you more about a party that it's brand loyalists, and they have been steadily flaking away for forty years from the Labour party.
Does anyone know what Labour stands for beyond not being the other lot?
Lets be clear – the current Labour party isn't coming to save us. Hipkins demonstrated in his brief foray cosplaying as a lo-fi PM that his version of visionless machine politics means he is going to be unwilling, unable and incapable of meeting the moment an election win next year might give him. I will bet that Labour's policies – when we see them – will be an agnostic, dull grab bag of timidity sharing no clear thematic unity or coherence with a wider vision of what sort of society they want for our country.
To my mind, the left needs to articulate three clear objectives (Three! You could print 'em on a card!).
Democratic renewal – term limits for list MPs, promise to link salaries to a basket of workers (say nurses, policemen and teachers) salaries, stand downs from lobbying post-government, democratic celebration (make election day a full public holiday), funding transparency and reform, promise to get tough with shady deals with strong anti-corruption laws and setting up an anti-corruption commission with teeth.
Social renewal – Smartphone ban for under 18 year olds. Digital services tax, data tax fund to pay for local news and media, and strip social media companies of immunity for content posted by their users. If Trump want to tariff us, play the patritoc card and rally the nation.
Economic renewal – promise to restore the link between hard work and prosperity, and address wealth inequality with promises of CGT and wealth taxes, windfall taxes and by having an "affordability agenda" – New York style government food stores, anti monopoly laws to break up the supermarket duopoly and others (petrol companies, insurance, power gentailers all come to mind) and a strong banking regulator with teeth.
Labour doesn't deserve anyone's vote as a right. Show me any party that wants to do the above and I'll do more than just be the negative voting, unenthusiastic ballot box fodder for them I am now.
Any one one who votes the same party always , because loyalty/habit or tribalism is a dangerous fool , imho!
Remember the 1999 campaign when they really did put the key promises on a card?
It was the standout feature of the campaign and had cut-through like surgical steel.
You could call it the brick that built. Because they were delivered.
I haven't voted anything other than Labour since I started voting, but I can't stomach Hipkins for all the reasons you describe and until they change him out I won't be.
Every innovation has a time limit. In 2005, the card caused significant problems during the campaign because it was easy to dust with a veneer of corruption. Fortunately National fired it too soon and Don Brash in full wacko flight was sufficient to scare off enough votes. Gave the weirdest double squiggle in the election campaign..
So not the point.
Labour 1998-9 established their key policies early, and sold them efficiently.
Plenty of other concepts with good cut-through.
Actually they didn't "established their key policies early", the policy development wasn't great in 1998/9 compared to previous campaigns largely because of the ongoing internal conflicts inside Labour.
There were about 250 short commitments without a lot of detail. There was a PhD thesis about commitments from political parties in NZ that listed them in exhaustive detail (found it).
What they did was to "sold them efficiently.", which was to take number of things (about 15 as I remember) and put them on card that went into most mailboxes. They picked ones that were general and had wide acceptance.
That was in 1998. It'd been done before in NZ back to the 1930s, but generally as pamphlets on different policy areas. In the 1930s publishing reasonably detailed manifestos was itself a novelty in NZ.
The card mail drop was new(ish) in 1999 and appeared to have an effect – probably mostly from novelty.
It has exactly the same effect of novelty that shows up in the literature about market expectations or advertising. The effect wears off as the technique becomes commonplace. At some point, some party who is affected adversely will find a counter (real or not) or start doing it themselves.
In NZ it was the question about funding the distribution in 2005. Using that smear technique by National used was also novelty in that election.
You get to 2023. Damn near every major party had their own pledge cards with major distribution. But this is 2023 – so the delivery options are much easier and far harder..
I even aware of the pledge cards myself. I only know about them because I just looked for an image of the 1999 pledge card (which I failed to find).
But think about the delivery mechanisms.
My rarely used mailbox is in the lobby of the apartment block and you need a code to get through a door to the lobby. The post and couriers have it, but postbox stuffers don't have it.
I was told that they were widely visible on social media. But few people I know, including me, actually look at ads on any electronic media.
Who watches free to air TV? Even on delay. I don't because of the irritation and time wasting of ads. That includes political debates because I never see TV stations advertising their debates.
I do read a lot of news. As far as I am aware neither the Labour or National pledges were published in political news. I can see some images in google search. It was all new to me.
Note to self… Must publish those sorts of thing on TS if only because they can be searched. The summary of the 1999 vs 2008 Labour Pledge cards in a comment https://thestandard.org.nz/3-more-points-on-the-secret-agenda-tapes/#comment-79910
Exactly! The biggest mistake we can ever make is trying to fight the last election
Managed quite well enough before and after 'Smart'-phones became a thing. The strong peer pressure to join the 'Smart' crowd – look at this.- ebbs eventually. Kia kaha!
I have other ideas for social renewal, for example first 15k tax free for people who did more than 125 hours of volunteer work in the previous tax year.
Also my wife is an experienced psychologist who has spent many years in youth forensics and she thinks the case to ban social media for under 18s is a no brainer in the affirmative. And since she knows what she is talking about I am taking her position on the matter.
It was a 'struggle'
, but I continued to manage well enough after 'Smart'-phones became a thing. Over time, any peer pressure to join the 'Smart' crowd ebbs – Kia Kaha!
Apologies for the repeat comment – I thought the first one @6.3 didn't get through.
The OP is still very much alive and not at all complacent. Just desiring a coherent and meaningful political strategy from the left.
This post is music to my ears! Full of wisdom, passion, history, and common sense!
Joy joy joy to hear someone articulate this so well
Thank you ❤️
Re LPrent's "weirdest double squiggle," the final uptick that won the election for Labour in 2005 wasn't an accident, it was the result of a deliberate strategy built in the Party to target 2002 non-voters.
It was carried out with a mail-drop delivered by Party volunteers throughout the country with a targeted message based on the key policies of tax relief through Working for Families, and interest-free student loans. It was devised, designed and organised over a period of several months and dropped at the last minute for maximum effect.
It made for an interesting night in the television studios on election day. It was a completely separate exercise from the so-called "card message" Lynn talks about.
I do agree with the OP that strategy is important, as is delivery.
Yes, that is a great example thanks Mike.
Yes.
By 2005 there was a growing number with student debt wanting to buy into property.
I remember in 2005 making a pithy comment in response to a Bill English policy announcement about their policy to make student debt repayment easier, that all (knowing of longtime policy advice to eliminate the interest cost for those here).
As for WFF tax credits, that goes back to the Laile Harre era, I was nagging her to go beyond parental leave (women in work getting paid time off) for the women who had a second child while off work etc.
I remember her response, other good things will come.
Thank you for your post.
Revolutions are generally subverted.
Progress has to contain universal truths.
However currently, the biggest task is to oust a well funded ruthless triad from office.
All the corruption of normal process should become weapons, Their self interest exposed.
Case in point.
Did Luxon do a type of insider trading, by knowing they were deliberately crashing the economy and housing, when he divested himself of his extra houses while prices were good. Just one example . Smart? or devious?, (as he had inside knowledge, saying he was "Sorted" )
imo.
So back to real progress.
Some of the foundations of a good society.
Fairness.
Public provision of Health Education Housing and Public Transport.
Rule of Law
Public participation in Law making, involving strict adherence to democratic norms.
Providing well for the disabled, addicted and injured sick or aged.
Supporting problem solving and planning.
Valuing cultural difference
Sharing community wealth through progressive taxes.
Further many sorted people say "I did this", failing in their hubris to acknowledge all the society they lived in did for them, and many, not all, but too many do not want to contribute unless they control the "tax" so they form Foundations to keep control.
When we say we don't like or trust a person in office, that is not the issue. Finding the key ideas being presented is far more important.
The constant dissing of managerial skills is undermining past good management. A good Government has to manage competing interests and fairly treat all, not drive hidden destructive agendas.
Currently things are not fair favouring capital owners over workers.
Costs are being moved from the Public Government purse, to Councils and in a disaster to individuals. Individualism not community.
Think, insurance problems, not backed by the State.
Disaster problems not backed by the State.
Water problems, not backed by the State and no solving of storm water and all shifted to Councils at huge cost to ratepayers.
Further austerity crashing asset values houses and businesses, putting many underwater.
All of this requires Community strength and determination to remove this CoC.
Then we begin the repairs and healing. So winning the Election is paramount imo.
Here's how I see it:
In Savages time, the labour party was the sum of it's people. I think the opposition was the Reform party but it's academic.
New Zealand was Britains farm. We didn't have to think about things like the homeless problem vs tax cuts for those who already had enough. There was plenty for all. Left vs right was more tinkering around the edges than people dying on hospital waiting lists to make the super rich richer.
And that's why the left has to stop offering a water down version of what the right is offering.
This election is the lefts to win, if it hitches up it's skirts and steps out. More, the demographics have less selfish boomers voting than ever before. GenX and beyond aren't just worried about money and the greens and tpm are growing areas of concern to voters. The planets are lining up, if the left wants to aim for the stars
In 1935 when the Labour Party were first elected NZ was deeply affected by the biggest economic event of the 20th century. My grandfather told me that MJS personally appealed to churches and individuals to support those without resources.
His family fed and provided a bed for many men (never mentioned women) who were transient and going from town to town looking for work.
I agree that the election is anybody's right now. Labour will win if the economy continues to flatline. But I know that whichever side wins both major parties policies will be pro-market, pro-business and pro-globalisation
I don't know whose version of our history you've been taught, but it's only tangentially related to reality.
New Zealand in 1935 was not a land of plenty. Yes, the gaps between the working and upper classes were smaller. But that’s because, by international standards, almost everyone was desperately poor.
The Great Depression had absolutely gutted the economy, unemployment was at staggering levels, and people were literally starving to death in shantytowns. Savage’s government wasn’t just tinkering around the edges; Labour came to power because the old economic model had collapsed and the state had to step in to rebuild society.
At the same time, New Zealand also didn’t descend into a glorious socialist revolution. The trio of reformers at the core of Savage’s Cabinet — Savage himself, Walter Nash, and Peter Fraser, were able, farsighted men. They understood that doubling down on the failures of the Reform–Liberal coalition was unthinkable, but they also knew that going too far, too fast would be political suicide. The genius of the First Labour Government wasn’t in extremism.
It was in offering credible, systemic change that ordinary New Zealanders could trust.
And that’s the lesson for today. The left can’t outbid National on tax cuts or ACT on deregulation. Nor should it try. It needs to offer something bold but believable: a vision of a fairer, more secure future that speaks directly to people’s fears about housing, healthcare, and climate. If it does that, the demographics are indeed shifting in its favour.
But if it serves up a watered-down version of right-wing policy, voters may as well pick the original.
I can't argue with anyone's version of events.
Where agreement could be found, I think, is the detrimental role banks play, both in the '30s and nowadays.
Res who specifically are you referring to as "the left"? If you are referring to Labour you basically know what you're going to get – more pro market, pro business and pro globalisation.
I voted Labour in 2017 because I believed that Kiwibuild would be a gamechanger. It was bold and had it succeeded we would be well on the way to fixing our housing crisis. Others thought that the Light Rail plans were bold and still others believed in Jacinda's bold initiatives to end child poverty. We were let down.
The only really bold economic policy available to Labour now is the introduction of a wealth tax. Both the Greens and TPM want one so it would make sense for the three parties on the left to join in unison and campaign on a wealth tax.
Except we know that Labour won't do it because they know the consequences.