Vox Populi: Ageing Boomers, Laurie & Les, Talk Politics.

“Old Baldy was booed by the Gender Gap.”

“THEY BOOED HIM.”

“Booed who?”

Hannah, the bar manager, couldn’t help overhearing the banter of her two favourite Boomers, right-wing Laurie and left-wing Les. She paused in her rounding-up of empty glasses and dirty plates to listen.

“Luxon, Laurie, the Prime Minister turned up to the netball final, and the crowd booed him. Since when did New Zealanders start booing their prime ministers at sporting fixtures?”

“Oh, come on, Les, your memory’s not that bad. Jacinda Ardern wasn’t our prime minister that long ago.”

“And if I recall rightly, Laurie, she received more abuse than any other New Zealand prime minister. But, it was only a certain sort of Kiwi who came after her. And, the hate they had for her was out of all proportion to her actual conduct as their prime minister. There was something quite deranged about Ardern’s enemies’ animosity. Looking back, I reckon she wasn’t vilified on account of who, or what, she actually was, but on account of the huge event she was conflated with – the Covid-19 Pandemic.”

“Spoken like a true Labour man, Les! But, you try running that line on those who were kept from the bedside of a dying parent. Or, the people who lost their jobs because they refused to be injected with a hastily developed RNA vaccine. Tell it to the retailers who watched their life’s work sicken and die. Tell it to the schoolkids fretting alone at home. Truthfully, Les, I think Jacinda’s ‘actual conduct’ merited quite a lot of animosity.”

“I think you’ve just proved my point, mate!”

“Touche! Les. But Ardern still isn’t the only New Zealand prime minister to have been monstered by her fellow citizens. Have you forgotten the 1984 incident when David Lange was set upon by a mob of Otago cockies? His driver and protection officers had to throw him into the back of the prime-ministerial limousine and power away before the furious farmers could tear the nation’s newly-elected leader limb-from-limb.”

“Hell’s bells, Laurie, I’d forgotten all about that! It was just after Roger Douglas had announced the abolition of all agricultural subsidies. A lot of those cockies faced economic ruin.”

“Not happy chappies, Les, that’s for sure!”

“And it reminds me of an even earlier incident – 1977, I think it was – when Rob Muldoon’s limousine was dented all to hell by the boots of a dozen or so sturdy Dunedin cops trying to hold back an angry throng of Otago students and trade unionists calling themselves ‘The July Front’. The constables had turned their backs to the crowd, linked arms, and, bracing themselves on the prime minister’s car, expedited his entry to the Dunedin Town Hall – where the National Party was holding its annual conference.”

“Let me guess, Les, you were there.”

“Might have been, Laurie. It was a long time ago. As you say, my memory’s not what it was.”

“Proves my point though, doesn’t it? Luxon’s very far from the first prime minister to be poorly received by the voting public.”

“Okay, but it also proves my point, Laurie. Ardern, Lange, Muldoon: they all came under fire from aggrieved minorities. Victims of the Covid regulations. Farmers stripped of their state support. Students and unionists venting their left-wing spleens at Rob’s Mob. But, being booed by the audience at a netball game? That’s a bit different, isn’t it? I mean, these were just ordinary Kiwis out for a night of sport. They hadn’t come to protest, they’d come to cheer. But, when they saw Old Baldy they just saw red – or, in his case, blue – and started booing. That’s got to mean something, surely?

“Could mean a lot of things, Les. It could mean the fans were just pissed-off at Luxon trying to muscle-in on a sporting fixture which, were he not the prime minister, he’d never dream of attending. Maybe they were annoyed at being used, quite cynically, as the backdrop for yet another National Party photo-op.”

“Yeah, well, when you put it like that.”

“And, I’ll offer you another explanation, Les. It was a netball final.”

“So?”

“So, who follows netball – mostly?”

“Women and girls.”

“Exactly! And who, by a scarily wide margin, favour Labour over National?”

“Women and girls!”

“Old Baldy, as you call him, was booed by the Gender Gap.”

“Go it in one, mate”, muttered Hannah.

This short story was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 1 August 2025.

Earning The Huia Feather.

Still Waiting: Māori land remains in the hands of Non-Māori. The broken promises of the Treaty remain broken. The mana of the tangata whenua languishes under racist neglect. The right to wear the huia feather remains as elusive as ever. Perhaps these three transformations are beyond the power of a Pakeha Labour leader to accomplish?

THE NEW ZEALAND LABOUR PARTY is 108 years old. By a wide margin, that makes it this country’s longest-lived political party. In all those 108 years, however, Labour has never given itself anything other than Pakeha leadership.

In spite of its claim to be the historical custodians of New Zealand’s progressive traditions, on the question of race Labour has allowed itself to be outstripped by all the other political parties currently represented in Parliament.

National elected Simon Bridges, the Greens chose Metiria Turei and Marama Davidson. Act’s leader, David Seymour, has been acquainting himself with his Māori roots for several years now. Te Pāti Māori speaks for itself. And then there’s Winston.

But the list of Labour’s leader’s is like a flour sack – white from top to bottom.

On the face of it, this is strange. Back in the 1920s, the Labour Party published a popular newspaper called The Maoriland Worker – “Maoriland” being in common usage on both sides of the Tasman as an alternative to “New Zealand”.

It is interesting, however, that as Labour edged ever closer to power in the 1930s, The Maoriland Worker became (much less colourfully) The Standard. Keen to pick up the votes of those who eked a living off land that had once belonged to Māori, “Maoriland” had simply become too contentious a word for Labour to retain.

Labour’s association with the Ratana Church, which ultimately delivered all the Māori seats into Labour’s hands, might also be supposed to have significantly improved the prospects of a Māori politician becoming Labour’s leader. Especially when one considers the fact that it was only Labour’s hold on the four Māori seats that allowed it to go on governing between 1946 and 1949. Had the Māori seats not existed, National would have assumed office a whole three years earlier than it did.

When the Ratana leader and prophet, Tahupotiki Wiremu Ratana, first met the Labour leader, Michael Joseph Savage, in 1936, he is said to given him four objects: a potato, a broken gold watch, a pounamu hei-tiki, and a huia feather.

The potato symbolised the loss of Māori land, along with the sustenance it provided; the broken promises of the Treaty of Waitangi were represented by the broken watch; and the precious greenstone carving stood for the mana of the Māori people. Restore these three, prophesied Ratana, and Labour will have earned the right to wear the huia feather – the sign of chiefly status. So precious were these taonga to the Australian-born Savage that, when he died in 1940, they were buried with him.

If T.W. Ratana really did possess the foresight attributed to him by his many thousands of followers, it is to be wondered who it was that he saw, looking far into the future, wearing the sacred huia feather: a Pakeha, or a Māori?

Last night, in England, the leader of Labour’s Māori caucus, Willie Jackson, was accorded the same honour as the New Zealand Prime Minister, David Lange, when he addressed the members of the Oxford Union. Curiously enough, debating at Oxford University is not the only thing the Labour List MP has in common with Lange. Jackson’s home in Mangere Bridge formerly belonged to the charismatic Labour leader.

It was on Lange’s watch that the changes which transformed New Zealand economically and socially, “Rogernomics”, were introduced. At the end of that process, however, the three transformational challenges embodied in T.W. Ratana’s three symbolic gifts to Mickey Savage remained unmet.

They still are.

Māori land remains in the hands of Non-Māori. The broken promises of the Treaty remain broken. The mana of the tangata whenua languishes under racist neglect. The right to wear the huia feather remains as elusive as ever. Perhaps these three transformations are beyond the power of a Pakeha Labour leader to accomplish?

And they cannot be carried out behind the scenes, quietly and bureaucratically. Willie Jackson and his Māori colleagues tried that route – and it cost Labour the Treasury Benches. If the three transformations of T.W. Ratana are to be accomplished, then it will only happen in the full light of day, with the backing of all New Zealanders – Pakeha as well as Māori.

Labour will not shake off its political lassitude until it gives a Māori MP the chance to fulfil Ratana’s expectations – and earn the huia feather.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 24 May 2024.

The Facts Don’t Always Tell The Truth.

Sins Of Omission: Ardern’s speech to the 2022 Labour Party Conference shows just how much of the truth can be obscured through the presentation of the “facts”. Had she been of a mind to speak honestly to her party, Ardern could have explained to conference delegates that the reason so little has been accomplished on her watch is because the Fourth Labour Government deliberately powered-down the state.

WHAT WOULD YOU THINK of a man who offered himself for high political office with the following credentials? He was raised in humble circumstances, fought his way out of poverty and, at 44, is a twice-decorated war hero. He does not eat meat or drink alcohol, loves animals and has an easy rapport with children.

Worth a go?

Not when you hear his name. Not when you discover that the man seeking your support is Adolf Hitler.

And yet, all the attributes listed above are completely factual. Adolf Hitler was all of those things. But, simply listing facts, especially when they are stripped of context, is not the same as telling the truth. To grasp the truth of Adolf Hitler’s contribution to world history requires more than mere facts, it requires understanding, interpretation and judgement.

When the Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, addressed her party’s annual conference on 6 November 2022, she cloaked herself in the legacy of the Labour leaders who had preceded her. This is what she said:

On the 9th floor of the Beehive building in Wellington, sitting directly behind my desk, is a picture of Michael Joseph Savage. You could say he’s on my shoulder but also ever so slightly in my ear.

“Of course it was Savage and the first Labour Government that lifted New Zealand out of the depths of the Great Depression. Not by cutting taxes and services, but by investing in jobs, and building a social welfare safety net. They built the country’s first state home. And not long after these social reforms - New Zealand’s living standards were among some of the highest in the world. Not for the few, but for the many.

“The Finance Minister who supported Savage, Walter Nash, then led Labour’s second government as it continued to build our nation’s social welfare system, while advocating on the world stage for peace over war after World War 2.

“It was Norman Kirk and a Labour government who tilted the country towards a modern future with reforms of trade, health, the arts, and education. They worked hard to foster a renewed national identity and partnership with Maōri - all the while challenging global evil such as apartheid and nuclear testing.

“It was a fight David Lange continued, making New Zealand nuclear free, while also righting the wrongs of the past by legalising homosexuality, and fully abolishing the death penalty.

There are many facts embedded in the PM’s speech, but precious little truth.

It is certainly a fact that the Second Labour Government was led by Walter Nash, but to suggest that he was some sort of courageous pacifist visionary is very far from the truth.

Nash was 75 years old when he became Prime Minister in 1957 and was a notorious prevaricator and procrastinator. The two Labour Ministers who drove the Second Labour Government were Finance Minister, Arnold Nordmeyer, and the Trade & Industry Minister, Phil Holloway. Inspiring these two men was a third – the senior public servant and left-wing intellectual, Bill Sutch.

Knowing these things about the Second Labour Government, being able to put Nash and his colleagues into their proper historical context, offers the present-day member of the Labour Party a radically different perspective on the possibilities of social-democratic government. Sadly, Ardern did not want to share even a small measure of the truth about those three years. Her only concern was to establish her place in the line of succession.

Poor Norman Kirk fares little better. On the basis of the PM’s summary, the Third Labour Government could easily be presented as laying the groundwork for the Fourth. The truth is, of course, very different. Kirk was a nation-builder who, like his Australian counterpart, Gough Whitlam, was determined to extend and expand the Labour accomplishments of the 1930s and 40s. In other words, Kirk’s government represented the antithesis of Lange’s.

The Fourth Labour Government made New Zealand safe for neoliberalism by dismantling everything that the First, Second and Third Labour Government’s had built. Ardern’s impossibly brief sketch of the Fourth Labour Government, in which Lange champions the anti-nuclear policy, decriminalises homosexuality, and “finally” abolishes the death penalty comes perilously close to lying by omission.

Lange initially attempted to water-down the anti-nuclear policy, and then made sure he was as far from Wellington as possible when the critical decision to either admit or deny entry to a visiting US warship could no longer be put off. The decriminalisation of homosexuality was effected by a private members bill in the name of Fran Wilde on a conscience vote. It was not a government bill, and Lange had nothing to do with it. The big battle over the death penalty for murder had been won twenty-three years before Lange became PM. It was accomplished under a National Party government in 1961. All that the Fourth Labour Government abolished, thanks to Sir Geoffrey Palmer (not Lange) was the death penalty for treason in time of war.

Ardern’s reference to the Fourth Labour Government shows just how much of the truth can be obscured through the presentation of a few highly dubious “facts”. Had she been of a mind to speak honestly to her party, she could have explained to conference delegates that the reason so little has been accomplished on her watch is because the Fourth Labour Government quite consciously decided to disempower the state, and had carefully dismantled all the machinery that made it possible for previous Labour Governments to make New Zealand a better place.

It is entirely possible that Ardern approves of David Lange’s and Roger Douglas’s “reforms”. Certainly, neither she, nor her Finance Minister, Grant Robertson, have seen fit to roll back the neoliberal revolution which the Lange/Douglas partnership began. And that’s fine – just so long as she doesn’t then pretend to be one more gleaming crimson link in the long democratic-socialist chain that begins with Harry Holland in 1919!

The Labour Party does not like to be criticised and is fiercely protective of its leaders. Over the years it has discovered that the best form of defence is to personally attack all those who draw attention to its shortcomings. Crucial to the success of this strategy, however, is the fostering within its ranks of a pervasive political amnesia, and the encouragement a profound level of historical ignorance. The measure of these Labour apparatchiks’ success is that, to date, not one party member has dared to protest the Prime Minister’s grotesque misrepresentation of the Labour governments which preceded her own.

There is so much that the Labour Party could learn from its past. So much courage that could be drawn from the men and women who refused to be told that their plans were beyond the scope of practical politics. People who didn’t have to pretend to be radical reformers. A party that said “Let’s do this!” – and then did it.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 15 November 2022.

Birthday Wishes: The NZ Labour Party Is 105 Years Old.

Doers - Not Talkers: Today’s Labour Party is very good at talking: yesterday’s Labour Party was honoured and loved for what it did. A hijab isn’t a state house. Covid-19 isn’t Adolf Hitler. And, its name notwithstanding, a soft-centred neoliberal party isn’t a mass movement of the New Zealand working-class.

ON 7 JULY 1916 the New Zealand Labour Party came into formal existence. That decision was not made in the mining town of Blackball, on the South Island’s West Coast, but in Wellington. The number of New Zealanders who still believe that the Labour Party was formed by the radical coal-miners of Blackball would easily outnumber those who know the true circumstances of its birth. To be fair, Labour has done very little to dispel this historical myth. Even today you will find Labour MPs posing proudly before the fading slogans of the Blackball miners’ union hall. As if, by some strange historical osmosis, the genuine socialism of the men and women of 1908 could be absorbed into the neoliberal souls of twenty-first century Labour MPs.

Labour’s blatant misrepresentation of its own history continues. In a message to members and supporters, Labour’s deputy-leader, Kelvin Davis, celebrated the party’s 105th anniversary by sending out a self-congratulatory message featuring this extraordinary review of Labour’s past leaders:

I want to acknowledge all our leaders, past and present. From Michael Joseph Savage, who moved furniture into the first state house way back in 1937, to Peter Fraser who was involved in setting up the United Nations. From Norm Kirk who helped Aotearoa recommit to Te Tiriti, to David Lange who said no to nukes and yes to the rainbow community. From Helen Clark who helped us Kiwis save for tomorrow, to Jacinda Ardern who stood up to hate and stood up for our health.

It is difficult to know where to begin with this crude travesty of Labour’s history.

Perhaps the first thing to note is the author’s (who may, or may not, be Davis) utter contempt for historical accuracy. He or she has cynically gathered together a grab-bag of “progressive” causes and assigned them – almost at random – to the heroes of Labour’s past and present. Tragically, this travesty will pass unnoticed by the overwhelming majority of the message’s recipients. For all intents and purposes, their knowledge of Labour, and New Zealand, history is non-existent. As a political and ideological community, the Labour Party no longer possesses the human resources necessary to pass on the stories that shaped the labour movement. Those who might have performed this service are either dead, or they left the party in disgust years ago.

How well I remember the stories told to me by an elderly trade unionist and Labour Party member, the late Fred Rudkin. He would describe making his way to the Tramway Workers union hall on Saturday mornings to be thrilled by the spell-binding “shed oratory” of Bill Richards, Dunedin’s foremost union agitator. And how, during the 1951 Waterfront Dispute, he and his best mate told lies to the Police to keep safe the local leaders of the locked-out Watersiders Union. He recalled this youthful resistance to the quasi-fascist “Emergency Regulations” imposed by the National Prime Minister, Sid Holland, with undisguised pride. Like so many who recalled those years of struggle, Fred departed the Labour Party in 1989 to become a founding member of Jim Anderton’s NewLabour.

Fred Rudkin wouldn’t have known whether to laugh or cry at the words attributed to Kelvin Davis. His Mickey Savage was the Labour leader who (at fatal cost to his health) brought New Zealanders social security “from the cradle to the grave”. Mickey might have been there to help move the furniture into the first state house, but Fred knew that it was Jack Lee who made sure Labour’s state housing programme was a success. In the scandal arising out of Lee’s vicious attack on Savage in 1940, Fred was torn between these two great Labour heroes.

His memories of Peter Fraser, likewise, encompassed more than his contribution to the 1945 United Nations Conference in San Francisco. He could tell you about Fraser’s conduct at another conference. The Labour Conference where Fraser did all he could – up to and including breaching the constitution – to ensure that Lee, his principal rival for the leadership, was expelled from the party for penning the article that “drove Savage to his grave”. If I remember rightly, it was Fred who first quoted to me Lee’s description of Fraser’s smile: “like moonlight flitting across a tombstone”. He knew that Labour’s heroes, like all human-beings, were deeply flawed and far from faultless.

I well recall my first Labour Party conference. It was 1979 and David Lange was the object of considerable resentment for his conservative Methodist lay preacher’s attitude towards abortion. Five years later, that same David Lange – now Prime Minister – did his best to persuade the Labour Party conference to water-down its stance on nuclear disarmament, and was shot down in flames by the party president, Jim Anderton, for his trouble. Lange did support gay rights, but the bill he voted for in 1986 was Fran Wilde’s, not his. What’s more, it was a conscience vote. Most Labour MPs supported it, but it was not Labour’s bill.

The target of the most serious misrepresentation in the letter attributed to Kelvin Davis is Norman Kirk.

Far from helping “Aotearoa recommit to Te Tiriti”, Big Norm promulgated “New Zealand Day” as a replacement for “Waitangi Day”. His purpose was precisely the opposite of today’s Labour Party, whose support for “co-governance” would have left Kirk scratching his head in confusion. His “New Zealand Day” was a statement of national unity, just as his inspired gesture of taking the little Maori boy’s hand and leading him across the Treaty Ground was a statement of racial equality and amity – not tino rangatiratanga. The Waitangi Tribunal, brought into existence in 1975 – months after Kirk’s death – was the work of Matt Rata and Bill Rowling – not “Big Norm”.

If Davis did, indeed, write this grossly distorted version of Labour’s history, then he owes his party an apology. If, however, he signed it in ignorance, then the sin is almost as grievous. If Labour’s deputy-leader knows so little about his party that he cannot spot gross historical revisionism when he sees it, then it is pointless to expect Labour’s rank-and-file members to take the slightest interest in what their party once stood for, and the feats it accomplished, in the course of 105 years.

On the other hand, it’s probably for the best. Today’s Labour Party is very good at talking: yesterday’s Labour Party was honoured and loved for what it did. A hijab isn’t a state house. Covid-19 isn’t Adolf Hitler. And, its name notwithstanding, a soft-centred neoliberal party isn’t a mass movement of the New Zealand working-class.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 8 July 2021.

The Kiwi Doctrine: Upholding and Restoring Human Rights In The South Pacific.

DIY Defence Of Human Rights: Imagine a highly-trained ready-reaction force combining elements of the army, navy and air-force specifically trained and equipped to project New Zealand military power independently across the South Pacific. Such a force would be capable of restoring ousted democratic governments in a matter of days.

WHEN THE LEFT-WING Fijian government of Timoci Bavadra was overthrown in May of 1987, I was outraged. At an executive meeting of the Labour Party’s Otago Regional Council, I asked my MP, Michael Cullen, what he and his government colleagues intended to do about this blatant attack on democracy in the South Pacific – New Zealand’s supposed “backyard”. Cullen was bemused. “What do you think we should do?”, he demanded. “Do our armed forces not have the capacity to intervene?”, I inquired. “What’s this? The ‘Trotter Doctrine’?”, Cullen chortled. The idea that New Zealand could intervene unilaterally in the South Pacific was dismissed as fanciful.

Interestingly, I was not the only member of the Labour Party who considered military intervention in Fiji an appropriate response to Sitiveni Rabuka’s coup d’etat. New Zealand’s prime minister, David Lange, had requested action from the NZ Armed Forces in response to the seizure of an Air New Zealand passenger plane, only to be informed by his departmental advisers that prime ministers lacked the requisite authority to order troops into action unilaterally. It was also made clear to Lange that the NZ Defence Force, as then constituted, would struggle to defeat the Fijian military in a full-on stoush.

That a democratically-elected, multi-ethnic, Labour-led coalition government could be overthrown in the name of reactionary indigeneity, while the Labour governments of New Zealand and Australia sat on their hands, struck a great many democratic socialists in the labour movements of both countries as outrageous. At a more personal level, the revelation that New Zealand’s armed forces could only respond to crises in the South Pacific by becoming an appendage to some much larger military operation struck me as appalling.

The genteel resistance encountered by Lange, coupled with the absurd configuration of New Zealand’s armed forces, confirmed what I had long suspected. This country operates on the assumption that it will not be permitted to act independently of its “friends” – Australia and the United States – and its armed forces have been organised and equipped in accordance with that assumption.

It gets worse. When the Labour-Alliance Government (1999-2002) determined to make New Zealand less dependent on its friends militarily, announced a radical re-configuration of the NZ Defence Force, there followed a series of disastrous equipment purchases which, to a cynical pair of eyes, looked suspiciously like sabotage. As if the “top-brass” were determined to de-rail and/or delay any and every reform which might render New Zealand capable of projecting its military power independently.

The election of the John Key-led National Government in 2008 locked-in the ill-effects of this military incapacity by starving the NZ Defence Force of the funding necessary to raise it above “appendage” status. When required, New Zealand can offer a very limited menu of services to the armed forces of Australia and the United States – but practically nothing else. In foreign affairs and defence terms, this leaves New Zealanders absolutely dependent upon the kindness of, if not strangers, then, at least, a couple of often quite disreputable “friends”.

Nowhere is that disreputability more in evidence than on the tiny island of Nauru. The Australians have deliberately subverted Nauruan democracy in order to facilitate their appalling “Pacific Solution” to the “problem” of seaborne refugees seeking asylum in the Lucky Country. New Zealand has had no option but to stand by helplessly while these friendless men, women and children have been subjected to treatment which is in clear breach of international law and Australia’s own undertakings. The New Zealand Government has repeatedly offered to take at least 150 of the refugees marooned on Nauru. The Australians have brushed aside all such offers with sneering contempt. After all, what can the Kiwis do about it?

What can the Kiwis do about it? Nothing. What could the Kiwis do about it with a radically re-configured and re-equipped NZDF? Plenty.

Imagine a highly-trained ready-reaction force combining elements of the army, navy and air-force and specifically trained and equipped to project New Zealand power both tactically and strategically. Such a force would be capable of securing airfields and harbours anywhere in the South Pacific. Deploying a combination of special forces and regular infantry units, the likes of Sitiveni Rabuka could be stopped in their tracks and ousted democratic governments restored to power in a matter of days.

In the case of Nauru, the ready-reaction force would be able to place the authoritarian regime under house arrest, disarm and detain its police force and Aussie jailers (just like Barbara Dreaver) and take the desperate refugees on board the air-force’s new C-130J Hercules transports. The detainees would be safe in New Zealand before the Aussies could even rub the sleep out of their eyes and demand to know “What the hell is going on!”

Wellington’s insouciant answer to Canberra would be that New Zealand was merely fulfilling its moral obligation to uphold international law. Over howls of Aussie rage, the government would then go on to quietly explain that this was the first – but hopefully not the last –demonstration of “The Kiwi Doctrine”.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 6 September 2018.

Still Looking For A Compatible Rabbit.

A Blast From The Past: It is nothing short of astonishing that Bill Sutton, the former Rogernome who aggressively countered the Fourth Labour Government’s critics with the assertion, “There is no alternative!”, is still unable to connect the dots between an economic and political system which insists that it represents the terminus of history, and the rising levels of political disillusionment and despair.

BILL SUTTON, a Labour politician of the 1980s, was the butt of one of David Lange’s most vicious jokes. Like so many of Labour’s “Class of ‘84”, Sutton was a Rogernome. Swept-up in the tornado of change unleashed by Labour’s Finance Minister, Roger Douglas, he and his colleagues found themselves, by the beginning of the Fourth Labour Government’s second term, dangerously off-side with both their prime minister and their party. By 1988 the divisions within Labour had grown to the point where Lange felt besieged by upwards of half his own caucus. Bill Sutton was one of the more outspoken of the prime minister’s critics.

This was the context in which Lange quipped to reporters that Bill Sutton’s much-needed brain transplant had been delayed because his doctors hadn’t been able to find a compatible rabbit.

Not many politicians come back from a crack like that. Certainly, few were surprised when Sutton’s “marginal seat” of Hawkes Bay – along with a great many others – returned to its more natural shade of deep Tory blue in 1990. In a few years, Bill Sutton had become just another former MP whose name, outside of Hawkes Bay, had been forgotten by everyone except political train-spotters.

As a member of that querulous fraternity, however, I simply had to discover whether the Bill Sutton whose Hawkes Bay Today/NZ Herald opinion piece I’d spotted in Dr Bryce Edward’s inestimable “New Zealand Politics Daily”, was the Bill Sutton – David Lange’s incompatible rabbit.

It was. And the title of his commentary, “Politics Has Changed For The Worse”, was more than interesting enough for me to click on the link. After all, if politics isn’t what it used to be, then its Rogernomes like Bill Sutton who must shoulder a fairly large share of the blame.

Not that there’s a single contrite word in the entire piece about the ongoing social and economic effects of the “reforms” of the Fourth Labour Government. Although a scientist by profession, Sutton was never able to grasp that, for all its pretentions to the contrary, economics owes almost nothing to the scientific method. The whole so-called “discipline” has always been, and remains, a sub-set of politics – hence its original designation as “Political Economy”.

I always got the impression that Sutton saw Rogernomics as an expression of natural law, like gravity. Certainly, he was one of the most tireless repeaters of TINA – the “There Is No Alternative” mantra which Douglas’s defenders dutifully deployed against the growing number of critics of the Fourth Labour Government’s economic “revolution”.

Thirty years on, however, Sutton (a published poet) is acutely aware that something has gone wrong with New Zealand politics – and society. As he observes, plaintively: “in the 1980s it was still possible for people with good jobs and supportive families to set these aside, and seek election to Parliament, in the hope of changing New Zealand for the better. And even within a conservative electorate like Hawke's Bay, it was possible to persuade a narrow majority of voters to agree.”

Not anymore.

“That would be inconceivable today, because New Zealand politics has changed, and not for the better. Steadily fewer people are bothering to vote, significant numbers don't even get their names on to the electoral roll, and those who still do these things have fewer expectations about changing anything. The best that most voters today are hoping for is a government that won't make things any worse. What a discouraging prospect for potential candidates!”

It is nothing short of astonishing that the man who aggressively countered his government’s critics with the assertion, “There is no alternative!”, is unable to connect the dots between an economic and political system which insists that it represents the terminus of history, and the rising levels of political disillusionment and despair. If this, the neoliberal world order, is as good as it gets; and if all the truly meaningful decision-making powers have been taken out of the hands of politicians; then what, in God’s name, is the point of casting a vote?

How does Sutton explain this lamentable demise of the democratic spirit? Oh, that’s easy. The steady decline in political engagement is just “one tiny part of a global phenomenon, the move away from representative democracy towards its only proven alternative: rule by power-hungry despots, who brook no disagreement, even from their supporters, and are ready to resort to whatever means seem necessary to shore up their power.”

Ummm, no, Bill. I don’t think so. The malaise you describe is traceable to the hollowing-out of our political institutions which began with the very same reforms you were so proud to champion as a young MP in the Lange-led Labour Government. The reforms which caused the Labour Party to shrink from a party numbering close to 100,000 members to one numbering fewer than 10,000. The reforms which gave birth to a professionally-trained political class, whose members glide effortlessly between the public service, the news media, public-relations and Parliament, and who have nothing but contempt for the opinions of ordinary people.

People haven’t “moved away from representative democracy”, Mr Sutton, representative democracy has been moved away from them. A necessary precaution, lest ordinary people get it into their heads to take on the greatest “power-hungry despot” of them all: the totalitarian ideology we call Neoliberalism.

The despot you helped to enthrone, Mr Sutton. The reason why New Zealand politics has changed so profoundly for the worse.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 9 March 2018.

Dead Reckonings.

Pub Talk: Mickey, Norm and David were sitting at their usual corner table under a framed black-and-white photograph of Karl Marx. Karl, himself, was playing pool with Helen Kelly – and losing.

‘THE WORKERS’ REST’ stood in a remote corner of the Heavenly City. It was a squat public house, set slightly apart from the tile and weatherboard dwellings that confirmed the neighbourhood’s proletarian status.

From its open windows, patrons could watch as sturdy working-men emptied catcherfuls of grass-clippings onto compost heaps; housewives, in bright sun-dresses, pegged the contents of wicker washing-baskets to rotary clothes-lines; and tousled neighbourhood children played happily in the summer sunshine.

The Half-Gallon, Quarter-Acre, Pavlova Paradise, on continuous loop.

Mickey, Norm and David were sitting at their usual corner table under a framed black-and-white photograph of Karl Marx. Karl, himself, was playing pool with Helen Kelly – and losing.

“I’ll never get used to women in public bars,” sighed Mickey, “it simply wasn’t permitted in my day.”

Norm sipped his DB Brown, nodding appreciatively as Helen sank another ball in the corner pocket. “Wasn’t all that common in mine, either. Although things improved markedly after the abolition of six o’clock closing.”

“Well, it was a brave barman who dared stare down the likes of Sue Kedgely and Sandra Coney!”, boomed David. “That the first place the women’s libbers wrenched from the male chauvinists’ grasp was the local pub always struck me as impressively practical!”

“Well, in my opinion,” said Mickey, with a nod in Helen’s direction, “it’s a definite improvement.”

“And this new Prime Minister of ours,” queried Norm, “is she an improvement – do you think?”

“Miss Ardern? Well, she’s certainly an improvement over that lugubrious Tory from Southland. But, she is very young to be prime minister. Gosh, I was 63 when the Governor General summoned me to Government House.”

“Thirty-seven’s not that old,” objected David, “Alexander the Great is said to have conquered most of the known world by the age of twenty-five! Not that Jacinda would be impressed by that sort of carry-on. I look forward to hearing her scold him for not putting his case for world domination before the UN Security Council!”

“Very droll, I’m sure, David,” said Norm, “but I’m interested in hearing how you think she’s doing. I realise we can’t call hers a Labour government, not with that strange fellow Winston Peters in tow, but surely we wouldn’t be stretching things too far to call it a ‘progressive’ government?”

Mickey frowned, and set his glass on the table.

“If you’re asking me for a serious answer, Norm, I’d say ‘Yes – but not very progressive.’ One of the first things we did after winning the 1935 election was to get together with the trade unions and draft legislation designed to restore workers’ power in the workplace. If your intention is to force the capitalists to behave like decent human-beings – and that was my government’s intention – then you must have a strong and sophisticated workers’ movement at your back.”

Norm chuckled. “Well, when they arrested Bill Andersen in 1974, it certainly didn’t take long for the unions to mobilise in his defence. Ten thousand workers marched up Queen Street to the courthouse to demand his release. I had to send Hugh Watt to Auckland to defuse the situation. The problem though, Mickey, was that in 1974 I wasn’t sure whether the workers’ movement had my back – or wanted to stab me in it!”

“By the time I received my summons to Government House,” said David, “the unions had already had 12 months of voluntary unionism. Their membership was plummeting and they were willing to swallow just about anything from us – providing we restored their precious compulsory unionism. My Labour Minister, Stan Rodger, tried to strengthen the movement, make it more sophisticated, but, when push came to shove, it just wasn’t there.”

Mickey and Norm stared at David for a long time.

“There was a reason for that”, murmured Mickey.

“Did your government have their back, David?”, Norm added, quietly.

“If the workers aren’t persuaded you’re for them,” Mickey continued, “then it’s easy for the Tories to turn them against you.”

“Cheer up, guys!” Helen Kelly stood behind them, a glass of wine in each hand. “Labour’s industry agreements are a bloody good way to begin rebuilding the workers’ movement.”

The three men looked up at her doubtfully.

“No, seriously, they are. So, if Jacinda could just get her act together on medicinal cannabis, she would put her government’s progressive credentials beyond all doubt!”

This short story was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 29 December 2017.

A Stranger In The Mirror.

An Indistinct Reflection: New Zealanders have been slow to turn against their country’s economic, social and cultural transformation. Most accepted the changes of the Lange government and its successors, at least initially, as necessary and positive. Thirty years on, however, the consequences of those changes are all around them. The global economy, with its free movement of goods and people, lacks the reassuring consanguinity of the homogeneous nation state. When a people looks in the mirror, it expects to recognise its reflection.

 

THIS IS THE STORY of a small nation which tried to move beyond its history as a British colony to become a more open and diverse society. It is also the story of how that country’s national identity was fundamentally altered in the process. To the point where many of its citizens are no longer sure who they are, or where their society is headed.

 

The story begins in 1986 when the new Labour Government of David Lange and Roger Douglas steered New Zealand in a radically new economic and cultural direction. It was widely believed that Lange’s predecessor, Sir Robert Muldoon, had allowed the country to become fixed in a view of itself that owed much more to the past than the present. Lange’s government was determined to modernise and open-up New Zealand to a new way of organising its “Polish shipyard” economy.

 

This determination went well beyond opening up the economy. An important part of New Zealand’s insularity, it was argued, stemmed from the narrowness of its immigration policies.

 

Prior to 1986, New Zealand’s immigration policies were driven by one, over-riding consideration: too preserve the country’s essential “Britishness”. For most of New Zealand’s history this objective had been interpreted quite literally. New Zealanders were proud to call themselves “Better Britons” and looked upon the United Kingdom as “home”.

 

From the 1930s onwards, however, this attitude underwent an important change. More and more New Zealanders, while acknowledging their British heritage, were determined to transcend it by constructing a nation that was more progressive, less hidebound and much more independent than the colony it had started out as. This view of New Zealand was given a huge boost by the reforms of the First Labour Government (1935-1949) and contrasted sharply with the more traditional view of New Zealand’s national identity espoused by the National Party.

 

By the 1980s, however, this Kiwi nationalist position was being widely dismissed as an unhelpful barrier to moving New Zealand into the new “global” economy. The survival of the sort of society favoured by New Zealand’s left-wing nationalists depended on the continuation of economic and cultural protectionism. But, with the tides of history running strongly against them, the Left’s preferences were fast becoming untenable.

 

The country’s almost entirely mono-cultural institutions added another complication. Since the land wars of the nineteenth century, New Zealand’s indigenous Maori people had been largely shut out of national life. Progressive New Zealanders demanded a new, bi-cultural, definition of nationhood. They also wanted New Zealand’s foreign affairs, defence and trade policies to reflect its geographical location in the Asia-Pacific region.

 

The inquiry launched by Lange’s Immigration Minister, Kerry Burke, in 1986 touched upon all of these considerations. It’s findings represented a decisive shift away from the de-facto “White New Zealand” policy that had, hitherto, preserved the country’s narrow ethnic profile.

 

Labour’s new immigration policy, like the free-market policy it was intended to complement, would take as its starting point the economic needs of New Zealand. Immigrants would be admitted on the basis of a culturally-neutral “points” system. Social cohesion, formerly achieved by its cultural homogeneity, would now be secured through strong economic growth. New Zealand was to become an increasingly diverse and multicultural nation.

 

Very little of this new population policy was known to New Zealanders. And the politicians of both major parties were in no hurry to inform them. There were clues, however, such as National Prime Minister Jim Bolger’s peculiar claim that New Zealand was an Asian nation.

 

By the time the rapid influx of non-European immigrants became impossible to hide, National and Labour could rely on most political journalists and a growing number of academic and business leaders to reassure the public that the new multicultural New Zealand was an entirely positive development. Those who objected, most notably the leader of the anti-immigration NZ First Party, Winston Peters, were condemned as racists and xenophobes. In the city where most new immigrants settled, Auckland, rapidly rising property values reconciled native-born citizens to its changing ethnic balance.

 

What the authors of New Zealand’s current immigration policy failed to account for, however, was the social inequality which free-market economics almost always generates. Where economic growth is based on large migrant inflows – as it is in New Zealand currently – and wealth is distributed unequally across the population, social cohesion begins to break down.

 

New Zealanders have been slow to turn against their country’s economic, social and cultural transformation. Most accepted the changes of the Lange government and its successors, at least initially, as necessary and positive. Thirty years on, however, the consequences of those changes are all around them. The global economy, with its free movement of goods and people, lacks the reassuring consanguinity of the homogeneous nation state. When a people looks in the mirror, it expects to recognise its reflection.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 25 October 2016.

Labour And The Art Of Deckchair Rearrangement: Andrew Little Re-Shuffles His Shadow Cabinet.

Doomed Exercise: The proverbial rearrangement of the Titanic's deckchairs has come to symbolise the sort of activity that serves no useful purpose. Andrew Little's Shadow Cabinet reshuffle comes perilously close to fitting this description. If Jacinda Ardern and Kelvin Davis are the best politicians he has to offer New Zealand, then it is definitely bold new ideas, rather than people, that he needs to start bringing forward.

 

SOMETIME THIS WEEK (the date keeps changing) Andrew Little will announce his Shadow Cabinet reshuffle. The refreshed line-up of senior Opposition spokespeople will be the electorate’s best guide as to who will be doing what in the next Labour-led government. Barring unforeseen circumstances, and unforgiveable cock-ups, Little’s promotions, reappointments and demotions will be the last such exercise before the 2017 General Election.

 

Very few New Zealanders will pay much attention to Little’s final choices. Labour’s ranks, thinned by successive and increasingly severe defeats, contains nobody upon whose shoulders the burden of the electorate’s hopes has yet descended.

 

This is not 1977, when the occasion of the Mangere by-election threw up the gargantuan figure of David Lange. This lawyer-turned-politician was not only larger-than-life but also (and this was the crucial point) larger than the incumbent Labour Leader, Bill Rowling.

 

For the next five years, the big question, both in and out of the Labour Party, wasn’t if Lange would replace Rowling as leader, but when. Observing the deep impression the new Mangere MP’s ebullient personality, vicious wit, and soaring rhetoric was making on the public imagination, those Labour MPs determined to steer their party in a new direction lost no time in recruiting him to their caucus faction.

 

The "B-Team" - aka "The Fish and Chip Brigade". David Lange, Michael Bassett, Roger Douglas, Mike Moore.

 

The Party President of the time, Jim Anderton, referred to this faction, derisively, as the “B-Team”. The truth of the matter, however, was that Roger Douglas, Mike Moore, Michael Bassett, Richard Prebble and, of course, Lange himself, constituted the most creative and dynamic group of politicians to be found within Labour’s parliamentary ranks. Regardless of whether one supported or opposed the ideas they were espousing, there was no disputing that theirs was the team to beat. Everybody understood that when Rowling fell (as he did, eventually, in 1982) things were going to change.

 

That is the way it is supposed to work in parliamentary democracies: Change is supposed to find her champion, and then, through the ballot box, acquire the power to make things happen. For good or ill, Lange guided the country out of the cul-de-sac into which Sir Robert Muldoon had led it, and the policies of Sir Roger Douglas (and his Treasury advisers) went on to change New Zealand fundamentally.

 

Nothing and no one of such prodigious capability lurks in Little’s caucus. Not only has Change failed to encounter a champion among its ranks, but she also struggles to find anyone interested in making much happen at all. Such reforms as Labour promised at the elections of 2011 and 2014 have been ostentatiously wiped from the agenda. And such rhetorical skill as Little is able to summon to Labour’s cause is of the sort that serves only to polish the achievements of the past. Lange’s extraordinary oratorical power; his ability to paint a future in which New Zealanders were eager to take up residence, is nowhere in evidence.

 

Certainly, there is nothing about his finance spokesperson which calls to mind the incandescent passion of Roger Douglas. Grant Robertson is not the sort of person who quotes Neitzsche, writes alternative budgets, or publishes a book entitled There’s Got To Be A Better Way. Although entrusted with heading-up a special party commission dedicated to The Future of Work, there is scant indication that Robertson’s investigation is likely to produce anything that The Listener wouldn’t be proud to publish.

 

The Wellington Central MP could, of course, be hiding his light under a bushel, and the final report of The Future of Work Commission could end up calling for a dramatic reduction in the length of the working week; a radical reformation of the law regulating workplace relations; state-subsidised retraining; and the introduction of a Universal Basic Income. But a Labour caucus willing to embrace economic and social policies of such radicalism is unlikely to look and feel as somnambulant as the one Little leads.

 

The latest public opinion polls in the UK are registering a sharp upward spike in support for the Jeremy Corbyn-led Labour Party among the 18-25 and 26-35 year-old cohorts of voters. Though well behind David Cameron’s Conservatives in overall terms, this surge of support from the young is of enormous importance to British Labour’s future as a viable political party.

 

As Little prepares to lead his re-shuffled shadows into Labour’s centenary year, he needs to consider whether his party’s future is likely to be rescued by people, or policies. If Jacinda Ardern and Kelvin Davis are the best politicians he has to offer New Zealand, then it is definitely bold new ideas that he needs to start bringing forward.

 

This essay was posted on The Daily Blog and Bowalley Road on Monday, 23 November 2015.

Singing For His Supper: Chris Trotter Recalls Labour In The 1980s.

Ready, Aim, Sing! Bowalley Road's proprietor, with more hair and less weight, singing up a storm at a 1981 anti-tour rally in Dunedin.

 

IN MY LAST CONTRIBUTION to The Daily Blog I described an incident involving myself and two friends drinking coffee in the University of Otago’s student union caf’ way back in 1983.

 

“Naturally we were talking politics and, as the conversation progressed, it turned out that all of us were working on the campaign committees of Labour candidates. That wasn’t so odd in my case, I’ve never been anything other than a democratic socialist. But one of my comrades used to be an anarchist and the other a Trotskyist. It inspired me to pen a little good-natured satire (set to the tune of Cliff Richards “Summer Holiday”).”

 

I even supplied the chorus.

 

We’re all working for a Labour victory,

No more Trotsky, no more Lenin or Mao.

We’re all working for a Labour victory

I’m glad the comrades cannot see us now!

 

It occurred to me that there might be some interest out there in the whole song. Such ephemera often serves to enliven the larger historical picture.

 

Before proceeding, however, I’ll share with you an interesting story connected to this little ditty.

 

The 1983 Otago/Southland regional conference of the Labour Party was held in Invercargill. On the Saturday evening of the conference weekend, seated in a bar (the name of which I cannot now recall) I sang my song to the clutch of left-wing comrades I was getting drunk with. They all seemed to enjoy it, singing along lustily at every chorus. What I did not realise, however, was that the Editor of the National Business Review, Colin James, was also in the bar – listening in.

 

The following Monday, I was back at work at the University Book Shop in Dunedin when who should drop by but the same Colin James. He was there to collect his promised copy of the lyrics – which he proposed to use in his reporting of the conference. (Yes, Labour was such a powerful political force in the early 1980s that even its regional conferences merited serious media attention!) Tucking his copy of the song into his coat pocket, he then informed me that his current ‘By the Left’ columnist, Alf Kirk, having just secured a position with the State Services Commission, would no longer be able to write for the NBR. Would I be interested in the job?

 

Thus did my career as a political columnist begin! Never let anyone tell you that writing and singing satirical songs is a waste of time and energy!

 

Just a few contextual notes before we get going. The “David” mentioned in the song is, of course, David Lange. Elected leader of the Labour Party in 1982, he’d lost little time in warning members against public shows of disunity and dissent. This was intended as a shot across the bow of the Party President, Jim Anderton – who was already sounding warnings about the Caucus’s rightward drift. Undaunted by Lange’s rebuke, Anderton urged Party members to be “ambitious” for Labour’s cause. This, I hope, will make the third verse a little clearer.

 

Anyway, here’s the song in its entirety. Enjoy!

 

 

“We’re All Working For A Labour Victory”

(Sung to the tune of Cliff Richard’s “Summer Holiday”) 

We’re all working for a Labour victory,

No more Trotsky, no more Lenin or Mao.

We’re all working for a Labour victory

I’m glad the comrades cannot see us now!

 

Oh, we all used to carry placards,

We all used to hurl abuse.

But now the Marxist vanguard

Just murmurs, ‘What’s the use?’ 

CHORUS

 

We all used to think that the workers

Would follow our clarion call.

But we’ve given up the Revolution

To go canvassing door-to-door.

 

CHORUS

 

We are told that ambition is a good thing,

But we’re warned that dissension is a sin.

So we’ve learned to turn the rhetoric down

When David’s listening in.

 

CHORUS

 

But it hasn’t all been plain-sailing,

The conservatives shook their heads,

When we forced through a remit requiring

Retirement homes for Reds. 

CHORUS

 

As Mike Hosking would say: “Happy days.”

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Saturday, 19 September 2015.

Surprise Moves

Insanity We Trust: Trace Hodgson's cartoon from the 1980s captures brilliantly our ANZUS "allies" gangster-like certainty that on matters of nuclear policy the USA and Australia were in a position to make New Zealand an offer it couldn't refuse. They were in for a big surprise.

WHAT A SURPRISE New Zealand’s anti-nuclear legislation must have been to the Americans. For decades the folks in Washington had (rightly) assumed that the “peace and disarmament” policies of the world’s Labour parties were merely the sort of promises left-wing politicians always made in opposition – and then abandoned in government.

 

The British Labour Party had once voted for unilateral nuclear disarmament. The Australian Labor Party used to favour a uranium export ban. In 1984 the New Zealand Labour Party was committed to a nuclear-free New Zealand. No worries. The diplomats at the State Department and the Joint Chiefs at the Pentagon remained calm and carried on. They knew that when push came to shove, such policies had a habit of changing.

 

The US Secretary of State, George Shultz, was introduced to New Zealand’s Prime Minister-elect, David Lange, as the rain poured down on the roof of a leaking hangar at Wellington Airport in July 1984. It was a brief (and soggy) encounter, but he came away convinced that this new Labour leader would work the same political magic as Bob Hawke across the Tasman. He would go before his party conference and make its embarrassing peace and disarmament remits disappear.

 

This time, however, the policy didn’t change. And the United States, lacking a “Plan B”, did what the United States always does when people and/or countries refuse to live down to its expectations and/or give in to its demands. It raged, it fumed, it retaliated and then it sulked – for more than twenty years.

 

And New Zealand’s anti-nuclear policy endured. Initially, the National Party promised to fulfil its historical role as Uncle Sam’s little helper and restore the status quo ante. It took the wise old head of National Party leader Jim Bolger to understand that putting things back the way they were wasn’t a winning political option. That the only correct answer to Labour’s nuclear-free New Zealand was: “Me too!”

 

The Nuclear-free New Zealand policy is, therefore, not only a lesson in moral leadership – but in leadership per se. It demonstrates that the need to constantly reposition one’s party’s policies in conformity with the prejudices of “centrist voters” is very far from being axiomatic. Centrist opinion in the New Zealand of the mid-1980s was very firmly in favour of remaining in the ANZUS alliance. Labour’s adoption of the nuclear-free New Zealand policy forced centrists to choose between what were, in effect, mutually exclusive options.

 

On this issue (but, alas, on very few others) centrist voters were forced to the Left. And, when they discovered that the sun still rose every morning in the east, and water still ran downhill, they stayed there.

 

The future of politics in New Zealand belongs to the political party which first draws the lessons from Labour’s adoption of – and persistence with – the Nuclear-free option.

 

Just as, by the mid-1980s, the Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD!) strategy of the Cold War had led humanity to the very brink of annihilation, so, too, are the macro and micro strategies of neoliberal economics leading the peoples of the western nations to the very edge of a  social abyss.

 

The first political party to devise a way back from the edge: to unmask neoliberalism as the most dangerous ideology to grip the Western mind since the equally totalitarian creeds of fascism and communism; will be able to write its own political cheques for the next quarter-century.

 

It could be Labour or National. (Both, to a greater or lesser extent, are neoliberal parties.)

 

Whichever it turns out to be, the first sign that things are moving in the right direction will be when one of them finally abandons the shibboleths of free trade and takes a stand for New Zealand’s economic sovereignty.

 

The second sign will be a bold diplomatic out-reach to the growing number of countries looking for a global trading system undistorted by the selfish, socially and environmentally destructive economic demands of the giant American corporations.

 

MFAT officials were in Singapore this week for the latest Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiations. The Prime Minister has been visiting Mexico, Brazil, Colombia and Chile.

 

The TPP, as currently drafted, unfairly advantages American corporations. The countries the PM is visiting are anxious to confound the United States’ imperial expectations and demands.

 

We could help with that. After all, we’ve done it before.

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 8 March 2013.

The Journey: A Political Memoir - Posting No. 6

Anderton's Party, Lange's Government: By September 1984 power had shifted from Labour's left-leaning, 85,000-strong party organisation, to the 56 members of the parliamentary caucus. Fiercely (and successfully) protective of it anti-nuclear policy, the party could not halt the "Rogernomics" juggernaut.

It was supposed to be a book about the birth of the NewLabour Party, but somewhere along the way it became the story of what led me into, and out of, the old Labour Party. In hopes of providing future political studies students with a glimpse of what it was like to be a left-wing Labour activist in the days of David Lange and Roger Douglas, I am publishing The Journey on Bowalley Road as a series of occasional postings. L.P. Hartley wrote: “The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there.” May these memoirs, written in 1989, serve, however poorly, as my personal passport.

Saturday, 8 September 1984

WELLINGTON’S MICHAEL FOWLER CENTRE has become a vast political celebration. Nine hundred delegates fill the auditorium – upstairs and down. “Labour is back! This is the Victory Conference!”

The stage management is masterful. Never before has the Labour Party’s touch been so assured. The platform gleams in the television lights; cool whites reflecting a Nordic efficiency. The party’s worship of the Scandinavian social democrats is reflected in the furniture of power. The cantilevered podiums rear up effortlessly from the floor, everything is smooth, all the corners are rounded.

Jim Anderton is triumphant. More than any other’s this is his victory. He presides over the party with an unquestioned authority.

But the party is not the government.

The days of crisis  that followed the general election have consolidated the leadership of David Lange and Roger Douglas. Overnight the balance of power has shifted. The party, vast and energetic though it may be, no longer has anything to trade with. The election has been won. The Parliamentary Wing is secure. The process of transformation can now begin.

It is begun with great subtlety. The delegates are invited to the Beehive. “We are your government. If you have any questions, come and ask your Cabinet Ministers.”

A sense of misgiving prevents me from joining the throngs of proud delegates who traipse up the hill to stand open-mouthed amid the pomp and circumstance of executive power. The parliamentarians do not need to speak; their environment speaks for them:

“We are the masters now.”

Power Shift: Following the Snap Election of July 1984, the Labour Party organisation no longer had anything to trade with. "Rogernomics" - the process of neoliberal economic transformation - could not be stopped.

Back on the conference floor, however, the parliamentary leadership’s control falters. During the debate on international affairs, Lange and Frank O’Flynn make a bid to soften Labour’s anti-nuclear policy. Anderton is outraged. Passing over the chair to his vice-president, he vaults off the stage into the body of the hall, and pausing only to roll up his shirt-sleeves, strides towards the speakers’ podium. The atmosphere is electric. In a few taut sentences he demolishes the parliamentary leadership’s arguments. The conference is ecstatic. The lesson is clear. In matters anti-nuclear, the party is not for turning.

The debate on the economic policy remits follows. In stark contrast to the earlier encounter, the arguments are all with the Government. Out in the lobbies delegates drink coffee and chatter away unconcerned as the parliamentarians demolish the rank-and-file’s programme of state-led investment, capital gains taxes and protectionism.

“We’re getting slaughtered in there!” Dunedin delegates Emily and Dick stare back at me blankly over their coffee cups. I return to the auditorium.

Rob Campbell, widely tipped to succeed Jim Knox as leader of the industrial wing of the labour movement, is addressing the conference. “I am frankly horrified at some of the statements of the Government.” Campbell’s delivery is slow and measured. By the sheer force of his personality he compels the conference to concentrate on the palatable facts of the Government’s conduct of economic affairs. “To go ahead without planning and controls, or to reject interventionism, is economic lunacy.”

Pat Kelly follows Campbell in the speaking order. Where Campbell dissected with the scalpel of reason, Kelly wields a broadsword of passionate rhetoric. Like some Old Testament prophet, he lays bare the economic pathway Douglas, Caygill and Prebble have chosen for New Zealand. His peroration falls like cold rain on the heads of the delegates: “These policies are an outright betrayal of everything this party stands for!”

Jonathan Hunt, the newly appointed Minister of Broadcasting, leaps to his government’s defence. “Mr Chairman, I believe Pat Kelly owes this conference an apology.”

Kelly’s reply has become part of Labour folklore: “Mr Chairman, if, in a year’s time, I am proved to be mistaken, I shall gladly tender to the conference my apologies … but I do not think you’ll be asking me.”

This posting is exclusive to the Bowalley Road blogsite.

The Unfortunate Experiment

The Unfortunate Experiment: David Shearer is an immensely likeable bloke, and his work at the UN was truly inspirational, but he ain't anybody's kind of leader.

CONFESSION, THEY SAY, is good for the soul, so I have a confession to make. I was wrong about David Shearer. I made the mistake of believing that a politician with a brilliant back-story couldn’t fail to give us an equally brilliant front-story. Well, as Sportin’ Life tells the true believers in Porgy & Bess:

“It ain’t necessarily so.”

And, now I (and I suspect you) know it ain’t so. David Shearer is a thoroughly likeable, thoroughly decent bloke, and his record at the United Nations is truly inspirational, but, come on, let’s face it: he ain’t anybody’s kind of leader.

David Shearer, like David Lange, is a creature of the factional and personal animosities dividing the Labour caucus. Bluntly: he was put there by an unholy alliance of right- and left-wing MPs to prevent the Labour Party’s choice, David Cunliffe, from taking the top job.

David Lange, however, had one thing going for him that David Shearer does not – a gift for oratory. When David Lange opened his mouth the words flowed out in gorgeous, highly ornamented and persuasive profusion. His soaring rhetoric had the power to transport entire audiences to the vivid world of the Langean imagination. “I see a country”, he would say, and within a few inspirational sentences, we could see it too.

David Shearer, by contrast, can barely string ten words together. And, when he says “I see a country”, he means Finland.

In a funny sort of way, this is a good thing. The problem with David Lange’s remarkable gift for public speaking was that it masked the fact that he was actually the creature of Roger Douglas, Michael Bassett and Mike Moore – the right-wing “Fish & Chip Brigade”. He was just so damned good at painting word pictures that people never stopped to ask themselves how firmly he was attached to the values and traditions of the Labour Party. Or, how well-versed he was in economics. We were all so entranced, so delighted that at long last Labour had someone who could beat Rob Muldoon, that we never bothered to track down the answers to those awkward, but vital, questions ... until it was too late.

David Shearer’s singular lack of political leadership skills has spared us that fate. If the first David’s story was a tragedy, the second’s is pure farce, and everybody can see it. In certain Labour circles his elevation to the leadership was hailed as “the experiment”. In those same circles, it is now being described as “the unfortunate experiment”.

That kind of vicious, stiletto thrust might have been avoided if David Shearer had made up for what he lacked as a speaker with what he offered as a thinker. If only, in his two, much ballyhooed, “direction-setting” speeches he had given the country some juicy, red, ideological meat to chew on. If only he had been able to plainly set forth an over-arching philosophical framework from which later, more specific, Labour policies could be hung, then none of the muttering and stuttering would have mattered.

But those two speeches showed not the slightest trace of “big picture” thinking. On the contrary, they showed every sign of having been inspired by an Auckland-based focus-group, and composed by a Wellington-based committee. The only picture they painted was one that revealed Labour’s deficiencies. That not only did the party lack leadership, but it also lacked ideas. Oh, that Labour possessed speechwriters like The West Wing’s Toby Zeigler and Sam Seaborne. (Oh, that it possessed a President Jed Bartlett!)

So, what have we learned from this debacle? What has Labour learned?

If by “Labour” you mean its caucus, I would say absolutely nothing. If you’re talking about the party itself, nothing it didn’t know already: that Caucus picked the wrong guy.

It’s time for the Labour Caucus to put an end to “the unfortunate experiment” and begin a new one. They could call it “democracy” – and stop taking their party for Grant-ed.

This essay was originally published in The Dominion Post, The Otago Daily Times, The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 27 April 2012.