To be like Taylor Swift, Labour has to shake it off

Taylor Swift (left) has the kind of skill set Andrew Little (right) could benefit from. Photos / AP, Wanganui Chronicle

Taylor Swift isn't the first person you think of when pondering the Labour Party. But during a heated debate about the merits of Swift versus Beyonce this week, the only consensus was Swift is a canny businesswoman.

She is adaptable, moving from country to the mass audience afforded by pop music. She assiduously protects her brand and self-image. She uses her influence carefully so that when Swift speaks, people listen. She stared down criticism that she was a sell-out. And as a result she is wildly popular and loaded to boot.

Every single one of those skills is important for a political party. Labour this week felt the growing pains of trying to make the same shift from niche support base to the wider appeal it will need to get near government. Its timing was spot on. It dropped its real estate figures during the sleepiest time of the political calendar, a recess week.

The Prime Minister was overseas. It is a news dead zone, as evidenced every year by the remarkable discovery winter is cold and sometimes it even snows and people get colds and flu. Until the New Horizons space probe started sending photos from its holiday to Pluto and Iran reached an agreement on nuclear disarmament, Labour's story on property buyers with Chinese-sounding surnames was the only show in town.

Cue cries of racism. Cue return cries from Labour's leader Andrew Little that race should not be such a sacred cow that serious issues are ignored. The peril in Labour's approach is that it is now in the same position as the United States when it swore Iraq was crawling with weapons of mass destruction by way of justifying its decision to attack, despite a lack of compelling evidence.

On this Labour blamed the Government, saying it would not have to use the surname technique if the Government compiled figures that showed the actual state of affairs.

Of course, it could have simply waited until the Government started to release information under the new rules requiring foreign buyers to get a tax number from October. But where would the fun be in that for a party looking for a gamechanger?

Some core Labour supporters, astonished it was their beloved Labour Party running the issue, publicly quit the party. Little held his ground.

It was a bit of tough love for a party base which wanted to be back in Government but needed a short, sharp lesson in the cost of achieving that.

The whole affair prompted ridicule from those on the right - including a satirical fake Labour website which assessed whether someone was allowed to buy a house depending on how Chinese their surname sounded. This told me there is a 65 per cent likelihood I am Chinese. National's Korean MP Melissa Lee tweeted a photo of some Sara Lee cheesecake and asked "does that mean this is Chinese too?".

National has so far taken the easiest path of dismissing Labour's data as dodgy and playing up the racism accusations.

National simply said the problem in Auckland was not who was buying the houses but having enough houses to buy. It cannot afford to be flippant for long and it's a fair bet National's pollsters are very busy. National knows from past experience just how effective a race card can be in converting simmering resentments into votes.

It is also aware it cannot afford to rubbish those figures completely because eventually its own figures could prove Labour right. In a city as voter-rich as Auckland, National cannot afford to give Labour the running.

But National is constrained by the complicating factor of being in Government. China has become the cure for what ails us in everything from trade and tourism to foreign investment. Labour's bomb landed just days after the Government released a paper on its proposal to lift foreign investment in New Zealand - a strategy in which China is key.

The day after Labour's release poor old Finance Minister Bill English landed in China to get momentum in exactly this area. It's safe to say there are a few "please explains" being tendered.

As for NZ First leader Winston Peters, he hates nothing more than being outplayed at his own game. Here was Labour mining the monopoly he thought he had on such matters. All he could do was sit there like some modern day Cassandra, intoning that the figures simply proved what he had been saying for centuries and his word was truth enough.