Editorial: Labour's pains offer rebirth

Labour MP Kelvin Davis.

Post-election discussion has been dominated by talk of Labour's future.

Labour's trouncing means it will have to do many things, but here's three:

*Be more positive about its relationship with the Greens.
*Pay more attention to its loyal voters with Pacific Island heritage.
*Respect a large swath of Maori voters for being forgiving.

The diversity of the Labour Party needs to be represented at the top, but this traditional source of votes has been taken for granted for too long. And the current talk about leadership in no way resembles the multicultural party Labour purports to be.

Where are the brown faces? Missing in action, with perhaps the exception of Kelvin Davis.

There are good reasons for changing - some of them cynical. As Berl chief economist Dr Ganesh Nana said at the Federation of Maori Authorities conference in Wanganui recently, 15 of New Zealand's 16 regions are losing population and getting browner, with the young mainly Maori and the European population ageing.

"New Zealand is going to look different. There will be more Maori and more people like me, which might be a little bit scary." Scary indeed.

Sharing power and making change is never easy whether it is the Labour Party, or the country as a whole.

Labour's relationship with the Greens has to be much more open and unequivocal.

If you are going to work with a party after an election, better show how that works before the campaign.

It was a tough election for the Greens who were disregarded by the media because they had few dramas and talk policy not politics. But they, too, may have to adapt and drop some of their more radical platforms, such as opposition to GE.

But next election the most important thing is to get people voting. This year's turnout was up, but still a million people didn't vote. If that many are disenfranchised - and not voting is not just laziness - something is seriously wrong.