New Zealand's Fifth Labour Government (1999-2008): a New Partnership with Business and Society?(Essay‪)‬

This article offers a specific perspective on the theme of this special thematic section, by examining the relationship between New Zealand's recent fifth Labour Government (1999-2008) (1) and business in terms of that Government's practice of political language. It examines, in other words, the specific ways in which Labour represented the relationship between business interests, society and the state. This exercise is placed in historical perspective as I compare and contrast the overarching discourse of the Helen Clark-led fifth Labour Government with earlier Labour administrations: the recognisably social democratic third Labour Government (1972-75) and the radically neo-liberalising fourth (1984-90). The legacy of the recently departed Clark government is still a matter for debate, given the lack of historical distance and the tensions within its policy mix. While some have described its record in terms of the re-assertion of social democratic policy settings, (2) I argue in this paper that it was also marked by a discursive shift that threatened to undermine traditional social democratic values. The inclusive 'Third Way' flavour of its political discourse constituted what Stuart Hall calls a 'politics without adversaries', (3) within which all New Zealanders were called on to pull together and work for a putatively shared national purpose. In this discourse, business was not represented as a set of material interests in need of control and guidance in the name of the greater good. Rather, 'business' was reified and presented as a vital contributor to a meaningfully shared national vision. For the purpose of this article, I understand social democracy as a 'parliamentary and reformist strategy ... designed not to abolish capitalism but to humanise it', primarily through economic regulation and the welfare state. (4) Social democracy, then, is founded on 'an historic compromise between forces [capital and labour] that had once seemed irremediably antagonistic'. (5) It is based, in other words, on an acknowledgment that the state shares some interests (growth, profitability and stability, for instance) with business. As Adam Przeworski puts it, 'the very capacity of social democracies to regulate the economy depends on the profits of capital'. (6) Social democracy's 'historic compromise', however, carries within it the constant tension between the demands of capital accumulation and socio-political legitimation, and its resolution of antagonisms is only ever partial and contested. (7) In assessing whether the fifth Labour Government introduced a new partnership with business then, it is necessary to keep in mind that social democracy itself is based on an idea of partnership and often includes active engagement with business. The interest in this article is in how the terms of that partnership were narrated, and in the connections posited between business interests, policy 'problems', political objectives and social antagonisms.