NEW ZEALAND’S centre-right National Party government was elected to a third consecutive term on September 20. The reaction of Otago University political expert Bryce Edwards was to predict “a lot of depression and despair on the left.” This may be an understatement.

Policy was virtually absent from the election. Despite growing income inequality, common across all the advanced capitalist countries, New Zealand has been spared the worst of the most recent economic slowdown.

New Zealand’s economy is tied closely to that of Australia’s, which is booming due to its extractive industries’ exports to China.

Thus — although in a population of 4.5 million, a quarter of a million children live in poverty — the white middle class are generally doing all right in what Prime Minister John Key calls the “rock-star economy.”

Instead, the big drama in the election came from the “Dirty Politics” scandal.

Dirty Politics is the title of a book released by investigative journalist Nicky Hager a month before the election, revealing leaked emails between senior National Party figures and right-wing attack-blogger Cameron Slater.

Taking their inspiration from United States conservatives, National Party operatives had been leaking damaging information to Slater to smear Labour leaders and other political enemies, all the while attempting to distance Key and his “nice guy” image from such below-the-belt attacks.

Slater was also revealed to have been paid by corporate interests to do the same against their own enemies, such as failed financier Mark Hotchin’s attempt to discredit a Serious Fraud Office investigation into him.

Dirty Politics showed clearly how a lazy and complicit media had simply passed on smears originating from Slater’s blog without taking the trouble to do their own investigations.

One such smear about campaign contributions from dodgy Chinese billionaires, which turned out to be false, almost provoked Labour Party leader David Cunliffe’s resignation earlier this year.

As if stung by shame, the media did at least strongly question Key about how close he had been to the Slater smear machine.

However, the prime minister systematically refused to take the allegations seriously, repeating that “most ordinary New Zealanders don’t care about things like this.”

The only outcome of the scandal in the campaign seems to have been to force the resignation of hard-right justice minister Judith Collins, revealed to be one of Slater’s closest collaborators in the book, and — perhaps not by coincidence — a perceived future leadership rival for Key.

New Zealand’s electoral system, adopted in 1996, is mixed member proportional, similar to that used in the German Bundestag or the Scottish Parliament.

The roll of indigenous Maori voters elects 7 constituency MPs, other voters elect 54 constituency MPs and parties are “topped up” by 60 MPs chosen from party lists.

Crucially, a party can only gain seats in Parliament if it gets 5 per cent or more of the party vote, or at least one constituency MP.

With this election, National became the first party in the MMP era to win an overall majority, with 48 per cent of the vote giving it 61 seats out of 121.

It will prop this up via co-operation with two MPs from the conservative-leaning Maori Party — which lost one Maori constituency to Labour — and two right-wing micro-party leaders, both elected in constituencies with National’s tacit support.

The Labour Party won 25 per cent of the vote and 32 seats, historically extremely low.

While still commanding the loyalty of much of the trade union leadership, Labour has been a thoroughly neoliberal party since the 1980s.

Labour has gone through three leaders in the last three years, with the incumbent, David Cunliffe, generally seen as comparatively “leftish” but bedevilled by right-wing leaks, probably due to be sacked in the very near future.

The media are calling for the next Labour leader to be “centrist” — by which they mean socially conservative and populist, while not diverging from the neoliberal consensus.

The Green Party, formerly one of the more radical in the Western world, made a conscious decision at this election to try to appeal to centre-right voters, with its formerly socialist co-leader Russell Norman appearing in election ads promising to be “more fiscally responsible.”

However, this didn’t get the party very far — its result of 10 per cent and 13 seats being a slight dip.

The populist New Zealand First party — imagine “One Nation” Tories or “Blue Labour” for a British equivalent — surged at Labour’s expense, with 9 per cent of the vote and 11 seats.

The bright hope of the socialist left in this election was the Mana Movement, led by Hone Harawira, MP for the Maori constituency of Te Tai Tokerau.

Mana is a radical party based on tino rangatiratanga (full self-determination for the Maori people) and struggle for te pani me te rawakore (Maori for “the poor and the dispossessed)”.

Most of New Zealand’s revolutionary groups and radical activists are involved in or support Mana, no matter their ethnic origins.

For this election, Mana took the controversial decision to stand a joint list with the Internet Party, founded and funded by German techno-billionaire Kim Dotcom.

Dotcom, who had previously donated to right-wing parties and had no radical profile, became a target of the New Zealand state when his mansion north of Auckland was raided by police, aiding his possible extradition to the US on charges of data piracy.

Dotcom founded the Internet Party on a platform of digital freedom and an end to government surveillance — openly hoping to punish Key’s government for what he saw as a betrayal.

Many socialists were shocked by the proposed Internet-Mana Alliance. However, these fears were somewhat allayed when former left-wing Cabinet minister Laila Harre was chosen as Internet Party leader, with Dotcom’s commitment of a budget of $NZ3 million (about £1.5 million) towards publicity.

The idea of a large increase of anti-neoliberal MPs was too tempting for activists to ignore, and the alliance was approved overwhelmingly.

Sadly, these hopes were dashed. The alliance gained only 1.3 per cent of the vote and Hone Harawira lost his constituency to the Labour candidate, thus eliminating Mana from Parliament.

The general consensus of the media is that New Zealand voters simply did not trust Dotcom, who was perceived as trying to “buy” the election.

In the last week of the campaign, National, Labour and NZ First leaders united to call on Te Tai Tokerau voters to vote for the Labour candidate.

No clearer sign of NZ Labour’s total capitulation to neoliberalism could be shown.

The Internet Party’s young, radical-liberal activist core — some funded on full-time salaries by Dotcom — had banked on enrolling politically apathetic young people as their voting base.

Sadly, this didn’t come about either, with more than 30 per cent of 18 to 25-year-olds not bothering to enrol.

While the Internet Party’s future is still uncertain, Hone Harawira is currently touring Mana branches around the country touching base on where to go from here.

The failure of the Internet-Mana alliance can’t be allowed to end the process of rejuvenating the left.

While the New Zealand unions cling to the increasingly dessicated carcass of Labour and the Greens move away from their radical heritage in the hopes of gaining respectability, grass-roots activists, social movements and fighters for Maori self-determination will have to reorganise.

With an increased majority, the National Party may speed up its agenda of cutting benefits and union rights, the selling of state assets and increasingly co-operating with US surveillance programmes.

The Dirty Politics revelations won’t go away, even though Slater’s smear machine is starting up again after the election.

The left has been battered and bruised in this election, but it has learned a lot. Now is the time to build a new strategy for the future.