Left out.

Well, I'm back. Being a law student in exam mode meant I had no scheduled time to clutter up the internets with my peculiar brand of bitter invective, substandard grammar and prediliction for terrible puns. I've missed writing, because since my self-imposed exile some quite seismic events have happened - Barack Obama's kids are getting a puppy, New Zealander's are getting a conservative government AND Wendy's have this really sweet new burger with THREE types of meat. While I realise that the people have spoken in Paul's ill-advised poll, and with a phenomenal turn-out of 12, have spoken overwhelmingly in favour of me blogging about kittens. I will, therefore blog about kittens..but not just yet. Today, I want to blog about something every more meek, helpless and in more desperate need of some warm milk and a cuddle than a Kitten.

In the whole excitement of Obama v McCain v Ms. WasillaWackjob, I sorta forgot that my own country, New Zealand, had an election too. In my defence, it was quite a forgettable campaign - while the Republicans were accusing Barack Obama of hanging out with terrorists and letting an unlicensed plumber improvise their policy on Israel, here in Noo Zillund, the most exciting thing about our campaign was ACT leader Rodney Hide's yellow jacket.

But it was still quite a shock to wake up on November the 9th and remember that Helen Clark is no longer the Prime Minister (or even the leader of the opposition), that Winston Peters had been banished to whatever swamp him and his racist party crawled out of...and that after 9 years of being under a broadly left-leaning Labour government, New Zealanders had opted overwhelmingly for the conservative styles of John Key's National Party (supported by a one man 'United' Future party, and a further right ACT party - which included a 70-year old Roger Douglas and a crazy man who spent $250 000 of his own money fighting restrictions on campaign spending). To judge by the comments left by pro-National supporters on the stuff.co.nz website, the next few years will be defined by a railing against 'dole-bludgers, single mothers, hippies, and peoples who ain't Kiwi'. Urgh. Oh yeah, and they want to privatize prisons.

The left were administered a good-old fashioned spanking on Saturday night. In no way this was a surprise, polls were predicting a major defeat for the Labour party for well over a year now. But whats more troubling than the election of a National-led government, and the ascendancy of conservatism in New Zealand has been the response of Labour supporters to their defeat. Taking heed from an article in the Melbourne Herald sun that damned New Zealand's election choice as been as 'reasoned as a dead slug', the default position of many Labour supporters has been to decry an election won because the voters were bored, wanted a 'change' without caring what form that change took, and simply were too ignorant to realise what they hell they were getting themselves into. To hear some disgruntled Labourites speak is to imagine that the public were determined to vote National and John Key could have been on TV the day before the election eating a baby and it would not have made any difference. Not only is this viewpoint offensive to half the country and who did not vote for Labour, but it is symptomatic of a wider failure on behalf of the New Zealand left to make a convincing case to the NZ public, and reflects an intellectual arrogance in the inherent superiority of leftwingism, to the extent that it alienates and undermines the average voter.

And it's especially troubling because New Zealander's didn't go to the polls last Saturday and issue a vote of protest against a goverment they felt agreed with their conception of beliefs and values but weren't governing well enough. I would argue that a majority of New Zealander's went into the polling booth and ticked National, because they believed the conservatism espoused by the National party was a better fit for the way they would like their country to be.

The majority of New Zealanders believe that the principle of 'equality of opportunity' is a principle that means anyone can achieve anything they want to, if they work hard enough. John Key, the man who went from a state House, to Merrill Lynch and now to the top floor of the Beehive is the living embodiment of this. People like myself, and others who put far far more effort into making the case for 'liberal progressive' values than I do, argue that the tag of equality of opportunity must be complemented by the idea that the lottery of birth forms a major barrier to acheiving opportunity - that the son of a doctor has more chance of being a doctor (or a lawyer) than the son of the hospital janitor. John Key's ability to rise out of poverty should be lauded, but not used as a positive argument in the case against welfare and government support, and the more compelling argument does not focus on the fact John Key succeeded but on the fact that there were thousands of others who were not John Key, and unable to overcome the barriers, of lack of finances, of lack of job opportunity networks, of geographical proximity to role models, that were placed in their way through no fault of their own.

They are other major issues, swirling around in the election campaign, that put me, and other liberals, at odds with the zeitgest of the nation. The battle over the survival of the Maori seats was not couched in attempts to provide the right of self-determination to our indigenous people, but in the poisonous rhetoric of 'special rights' for one group over another. Crime remains seen as the outcome of moral badness, not the inevitable result of gross and increasing social and economic inequalities, and something that needs to be adressed at the underlying economic causes. Smacking your children is seen as an inherent right of parenthood, and attempts to make the smacking of children illegal was seen as an attempt to make criminals out of good parents, and not an attempt to drag the ability to define the difference between a 'corrective smack' and 'abuse' away from the arcane, precedential and slow-to-react judiciary to a police force with a better ability to gauge what is acceptable in the present day. The banning of lightbulbs that provide an inefficient environmental clusterfuck, was not seen as a valid way to combat climate change, but another example of government as an overbearing nanny that did not trust in the rationality of its subjects.

That's why when I hear a Labour or Green or a supporter of anyone left decrying their fellow National-voting New Zealanders as idiots, I cringe. Because calling people idiots is not a good way to win their support. More broadly it shows that the left has fallen into a belief in the inherent superiority of their ideas to the extent that the onus should not fall on them to justify their position - after all, social welfare is JUST GOOD. Social Welfare may be a good thing, as may the banning of smacking, the retention of the Maori seats etc. But anytime a government policy requires the removal of a right or a freedom from people, or even alters the status quo, the onus must be on those who believe in the change to prove to others why that change is a good thing.

Labour failed to do that in 2008. But that doesn't mean that Labour needs to lurch to the right, and try and capture National's supporters (in the way that National lurched to the left, adopting a whole lot of Labour's policies that seemed politically sexy). But it means that the New Zealand left shouldn't flee to the idealogical trenches, abandon large swathes of the New Zealand electorate as retards, and play poker amongst themselves while dreaming of moving to Amsterdam. National was elected overwhelmingly because its overarching ideals were more appealing. We've got to spend the next three years finding out why that electorate rejected the ideals of progressive liberalism, and how we can make the case more convincing. The next three years in opposition, offers Labour a chance for renewal to look at some stuff that Norman Kirk wrote and return to their core beliefs. And it offers media outlets a chance to make puns like 'Key's rusty', or 'Dunne Deal'.

Hey, and Winston won't be spewing bile about Asians. It's not all bad.