Labour Party Finance Spokesperson Grant Robertson bounds into the Critic office on a sunny O-Week Tuesday. While some of the staff may have been a bit dusty from the night before, Robertson is positively vibing. The source of that enthusiasm could be the natural rush of non-stop meetings with constituents, supporters and special interest groups, but the smart money would suggest it was something more chemical - despite already holding a takeaway coffee cup in his hand, he eagerly suggests heading down to Good Earth café for another.
As we walk there, he paints the perfect profile of the high-powered politician: black suit, rapid gait, glancing at his phone every few seconds as if following up on some crucial breaking news. In reality, he’s checking the cricket scores, desperately hoping for a Blackcaps revival in the second Test against Australia. He puts a lot of trust in Matt Henry to make something miraculous happen, and we speculate about the chances that BJ Watling could save the day with a rare Test century (Spoiler Alert: He doesn’t).
If it weren’t for the fact that I eventually had to move the topic of conversation on to politics, he probably would have been happy to keep talking sports for the entire interview. He spoke about meeting his husband while playing for the Krazy Knights, a gay mens rugby club, his attempts to get back in shape to play for the Parliamentary rugby team, and getting recruited into a 3 on 3 basketball tournament by fellow Labour MP Rino Tirikatene.
But as much as his passion for sport shines through, it’s the discussion of political activism that really makes his eyes light up. Robertson’s history here is expansive. At age 17, he attended his first protest march in response to the Fourth Labour government’s decision to introduce tuition fees for all university students, a move Robertson says he “Was not supportive of at all”. 26 years later, his first major move in his new Finance portfolio re-committed his party to the idea of free tertiary education.
There’s something poetic about his journey from angry young activist to political power broker, it represents the idea that everyone, no matter how insignificant they may feel at the time, has the ability to influence change. A generation that once yelled into the wind while baby boomers ignored them has finally taken control of the wheel.
OUSA, activitism and arrests
Grant Robertson’s career in politics started with more of a whimper than a bang. He first ran unsuccessfully in the OUSA elections at the end of 1991 for the position of Publicity and Information officer (equivalent to the Campaigns Officer today).
“I ran for that but actually didn’t get on. I was the next polling candidate” he said, but, proving that overwhelming apathy to OUSA by-elections is not unique to the current crop of students, “A person who had been elected resigned before the year started and there was a by-election, so I threw my name in but I didn’t campaign at all, but I got on, so that was cool.”
After a year on the executive, he rose to the presidency for 1993. His term in office would come to be defined by one moment in particular: a raucous protest on Union Lawn resulting in riot police, a catalogue of injuries, and no less than 13 students arrested, including himself.
The issue at hand was a proposal by the University Council to hike up course fees by 15 percent. Robertson, as a student representative on the council, had managed to convince them to reconsider it. He admits he “kind of knew we couldn’t stop the fee increase” but was ”trying to get the university to introduce a hardship fund for students who couldn’t pay.”
A protest rally at the union building drew a crowd of over 1000, whom Robertson led in a march toward the registry building, at which point he and the other student representatives went inside to attend the meeting. “People were really fed up, and people went around to different parts of the building and some people tried to get in”. That led to those inside barricading the doors to protect themselves from the would-be intruders “There was a lot of tension outside, door handles being broken and all sorts of shit”.
Eventually the meeting finished, and the council had finalised the fee increases. However, the crowds remained, barring the council members from exiting. That led to what Robertson describes as “a really stupid decision” to call the police and have them forcefully clear a path. Within minutes, an army of police had descended on the building, forcefully clearing students away and unleashing blows with their batons. One photographer captured an officer dragging two defiant girls away by their ponytails. Robertson and the rest of the Executive maintained that it was “so unnecessary” for what they considered a “legitimate” and “passionate but ultimately peaceful protest”.
Fast forward a couple weeks and, Robertson explains “There was a knock on my door, and it was the police arresting me for ‘Incitement to Riot’.” There were 13 people arrested that day, although he believes “The truth is it was more them trying to make a point to be honest, so I was arrested but never charged.” Of those 13 only 4 faced charges, and just one, a non-student, was convicted. According to Judge David Carruthers, the police has used “gratuitous and unnecessary force”, which Robertson says was “a real vindication”. Incitement to Riot has a maximum sentence of 10 years imprisonment, so he says he is “kind of glad it didn’t go through.”
Labour, Learning, & Career Politicians
Following his tenure at OUSA, Grant won the position of NZUSA co-president in 1996, worked for MFAT in Samoa, the UN in New York, and eventually made his way home where he worked his way up to the position of Special Advisor to Helen Clark.
During his two unsuccessful runs for the party leadership in 2013 and 2014, there were questions raised about whether he was ‘too beltway’ – suggesting that he was too much of a political insider who lacked real world experience. Robertson adamantly rejects this argument, saying “I think people come to politics with all sorts of backgrounds, so I don’t think there’s any trouble with somebody who has worked in a Minister’s office becoming a politician, it’s about who you are as a person, and the skills you bring to the job. I think the concept of a career politician is not something that I really get, I don’t really know what that means. But I’ve pushed trolleys in a supermarket, I’ve worked for OUSA, I’ve been a diplomat, and I’ve worked in Helen’s office. But I don’t think the phrase ‘career politician’ means very much.”
When I asked about his impressions of Helen Clark while working for her, he could barely hold back his praise, unleashing a tsunami of positive adjectives – “fantastic leader”, “incredibly sharp”, “very, very good instincts”, “extraordinary work ethic”, “incredibly hard fighter” – and that’s barely half of it. But in the midst of that praise, he snuck in an inherent defence of current leader Andrew Little’s dismal poll ratings, pointing out that “at one point she had a 2 percent approval rating, lost an election in ‘96, carried on through to ‘99 and won”.
Unsuccessful Elections
Following the Labour party’s performance in the 2014 election, which Grant describes as “disastrous”, he put his name forward as a candidate for leader. Having finished a close second to David Cunliffe in the previous leadership election, he was an immediate frontrunner. Picking Jacinda Ardern as his running mate and campaigning under the slogan ‘New Generation To Win’, he put up a strong performance, rallying support within Young Labour and winning a majority of support from both party members and caucus. However, due to Andrew Little receiving near unanimous backing from affiliated unions, he lost the final vote by a mere 1 percent.
While it can sometimes be difficult to draw a contrast between candidates competing for positions within the same party, here there were two clear platforms to choose from. While both candidates agreed that the party needed drastic change, Andrew Little ran on major policy reform – dropping anything that wasn’t winning over the voters, particularly the Capital Gains Tax and raising the age of Superannuation. Robertson shied away from ditching policies that remained popular with the party base (if not the general public), focusing more on improving the party’s performance among the more superficial aspects of politics: messaging, marketing, and producing less annoyingly cheesy TV ads.
In hindsight, he admits that Andrew’s ideas were needed – “I think its fair to say that we did need to go back and have a look at those. I mean, Andrew won, so we’re doing it, but I’ve accepted the fact that we certainly didn’t present those promises well… in regards to the Super age, we came to that policy from the wrong place. We took it to two elections, and at some point you’ve got to look at yourself and say we’ve got to look at that”
When he unsuccessfully ran for leader against David Cunliffe in 2013, not only was he shunted down the list in the aftermath, but so were a number of his closest supporters, including Dunedin MPs David Clark and Clare Curran. Little took the opposite approach. Rather than trying to assert his authority over his vanquished opponents, he brought them into the huddle, offering Grant the number 3 spot on the list and the sought-after Finance portfolio.
That move seems to have soothed the discontent within the party, drastically lowering the level of public infighting and internal leaking that was happening during Cunliffe’s term. While Robertson dismisses the idea of an “Anyone But Cunliffe” movement within the caucus as media narrative, he does offer some harsh reflection on his own party’s actions – “What was really disturbing about that period was the amount of leaking of stuff, internal discussions and things. That had to stop, because the number of times as a candidate I had people say to me ‘If you can’t organise yourselves, how can you organise the country?’, and that’s completely legitimate criticism, that if you’re internally scrapping you’re not up for the job.”
The first meeting between himself and Little following the leadership election was “remarkably amicable.” Robertson says, ”That’s not to say it didn’t take me a while personally to get over the loss, I think you’ve got to be realistic and human about it, you want to think you can say OK and get back on the horse straight away, but actually it takes a bit of time, and it did”
Moving Forward & the Future of Work
The Future of Work Commission is a Labour Party project aimed at identifying how technological changes are going to change the workforce as we know it, and introducing policies to counter them. In the same way that many blue collar manufacturing jobs were lost to automation in the 20th century, many academics fear that white collar desk jobs may soon also be at risk as software becomes more and more advanced.
After a year of fact-finding, researching, and consulting with everyone from academics, to unions, business people, and even foreign Ministers, the first policy to come from the Commission was a bold scheme to provide three years free tertiary education to every New Zealander. “The pace and speed of the technology means we’ve got to do a better job of preparing ourselves” Robertson says “And yeah, one way of approaching it is to say it will work itself out, but I just don’t believe that. You’ve got the responsibility to make sure people are getting the education, getting the training to prepare themselves.”
Minster for Tertiary Education Steven Joyce has called the proposal “failed policy”, pointing out that Internet-Mana ran on the same promise in the last election to little success. When challenged on this, Robertson replied that “With all due respect to a party like Internet-Mana, they can promise whatever the hell they want. We’re a serious party of government, we have to think very carefully about how we make investments. This policy is phased in over a decent period of time, and also we’re offering it as a clear alternative to National’s tax cuts”.
Offering an alternative to tax cuts is a strategy which has worked well for Labour in the past – In 2005 their policy of zero-interest student loans struck a chord with voters and propelled them back into government for a third term. Robertson is eager to point out that this policy goes above and beyond what they have offered in the past, “The link to the Future of Work is really important, because this is not just about managing the debts that people take on from study, because while that is an important by-product of this policy, the primary motivation is the future of work, which is essentially the idea that you can just finish school and you never have to re-train in your life is gone, people need re-training and upskilling”
More To Come
While current students will be unlikely to benefit from the policy, simply due to the fact that Labour is still in opposition – “If we’re elected 2017, it’s too late to change things for 2018, so realistically 2019 is as early as we could start it.’’ Robertson promises there is more to come in the Tertiary department, “We can’t put everything out at once, for various reasons political and non-political. We understand that the living costs, the accommodation costs are really tough going for people. We get that, we know the amount of money available for the student loan scheme and living costs is really tight, and we want to address that.”
Grant Robertson’s journey in politics has always been about big ideas and generating enthusiasm. Whether he can take those lofty goals to an election, win, and put them into action? I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.