Grant Brookes speaking as an NZNO delegate at Wellington Fairness at Work rally.

Grant Brookes, Fightback member, is standing for election to Capital and Coast District Health Board (DHB) at the upcoming 2013 local body elections. Brookes is standing on a Health First ticket, endorsed by the Nurses Organisation (NZNO) and the MANA Movement. Fightback writer Ian Anderson interviewed him.

FB: What are your goals in standing for election to the Capital and Coast District Health Board?

GB: Elections are a difficult arena for activists. They favour candidates with big budgets, high public profiles and easy access to mainstream media, who trade off conventional memes – in other words, the mouthpieces of the rich and powerful.

But contesting elections is an important part of building a mass movement for radical change.

Many goals can be served by standing. For example, standing in elections can help legitimise and popularise radical ideas, raise the profile of socialist groups and recruit new members, put pressure on political parties which claim to represent working class and oppressed groups, and so on.

I have stood in elections in the past in pursuit of some of these goals.

But I am standing for election to the Capital and Coast District Health Board this October with the aim of winning a seat. This different goal colours all aspects of my campaign. [Read more…]

The latest opinion polls put John Minto – teacher, veteran activist and MANA movement candidate – in third place in the race for Mayor of Tamaki Makaurau/Auckland. Fightback writer Daphne Lawless caught up with him at his campaign headquarters.

Why has John Minto decided to run for the most powerful urban office in Aotearoa/New Zealand? He hesitates for quite a long time before answering – he calls it “the hardest question”.

It’s certainly not a question of seeking the limelight. A recent interview in the NZ Herald by Michelle Hewitson focussed relentlessly on delving Minto’s personality – and bringing up what John calls “the wallpaper of history” about his 30-year activist career. So he seems quite relieved that Fightback is interested in his campaign’s politics.

“I wouldn’t have stood as an independent”, he tells us. ‘The MANA Movement is “keen to raise its profile in the community,” he explains, as a “building-block” for the general election next year.

A major goal of the Minto for Mayor campaign, John explains, is to change the perception of MANA as simply a Maori Party split, with Pakeha (European-ethnicity) leftists merely being supporters of Maori aspirations. John gives this as the reason why, in the last general election in 2011, “all of the MANA candidates in general seats bombed”, and only their main Maori spokesperson, Hone Harawira, was elected to Parliament.

Building “a broader base for MANA in Tamaki” is thus a crucial goal of the campaign. To this end, John mentions the role of revolutionary leftists – in particular the Socialist Aotearoa group – in his campaign, alongside single-issue activists such as the Tamaki Housing Group and some individual Green Party members. [Read more…]

From the December-January issue of The Spark.For a longer piece on the Mana Party in the election, see this article.

The Key Factor: PR and The National Party

Novembers’ election saw a narrow victory for the National Party and its allies. Compared to their 2008 result, National saw their vote drop by about 10%- over 95,000 votes. They only received such a large share of the vote because Labours dropped even more- an enormous 255,000. ACT went from 5 MPs to 1, who would have been gone too if not for winning Epsom- the country’s richest electorate with the lowest Maori population. The Greens and NZ First were the only parties in parliament that grew their vote from 2008¹. 1 in 4 people did not vote. [Read more…]