On The Right Of The Left: Raised in the public works camps of the Great Depression; organiser for the Workers Union; staunch anti-communist: Ron Bailey held the Heretaunga electorate in the Hutt Valley from 1960 until 1981. Few Labour parliamentarians have exemplified more vividly the ideological elasticity of Labour's "broad church".
THE FIRST LABOUR CANDIDATE I ever voted for was Ron Bailey.
He’d inherited the Hutt Valley seat of Heretaunga from Labour’s outstanding
Minister of Trade & Industry, Phil Holloway, in 1960. Encompassing a good
part of the Hutt Valley’s manufacturing industries, the Heretaunga electorate
was about as safe as any aspiring Labour MP could wish. Having won it,
Heretaunga should have been Bailey’s for life.
Not that I knew anything about Ron Bailey as I
conscientiously drew a line through the names of all the other candidates on my
ballot paper. (I must confess, however, to hesitating over that of the Values
Party candidate, J.M. Overton.) As a callow 19 year-old, I cared a great deal
less about the personal histories of the candidates than I did about the
parties they represented.
I cast my first vote for Labour in 1975 to honour Norman
Kirk’s legacy. His leadership had impressed me tremendously. From the dispatch
of a New Zealand frigate to the French atomic testing site at Mururoa, to the
cancellation of the 1973 Springbok Tour, Kirk laid down a template for moral
clarity and political courage by which I, and many thousands of other young New
Zealanders, could judge his successors.
I was also voting for the self-evident decency of Kirk’s
political heir, Bill Rowling; the progressive education policies of Phil Amos;
and the radical social vision of Labour’s Attorney General, Dr Martyn Finlay.
Theirs were the democratic socialist stars by which I allowed myself to be
guided. Against such a flaring legacy, the star of Ron Bailey, Minister of
Railways, shone only dimly.
Had I bothered to investigate the background of the man I
was voting for, I would have been, by turns, both impressed and appalled.
Born in 1926, Bailey spent his childhood years in the
infamous public works camps of the Great Depression. In his 2015 obituary of
Bailey Dominion Post journalist Tom
Fitzsimons describes the sort of places that five-year-old Ron would have
called home: “His family lived in two conjoined gable-style tents with wooden
floorboards, a corrugated-iron fireplace, no sink or bath, and kerosene lamps
for light.”
Bailey’s political career didn’t really get started until he
was 29, when he became an organiser for the New Zealand Workers Union. That was
in 1956, and he must have impressed his fellow unionists as a go-getter because
just four years later he was the Labour MP for Heretaunga.
If you’re thinking Bailey was some sort of socialist
firebrand, then think again. Like so many of his conservative working-class
contemporaries in both the unions and the Labour Party (including Kirk himself)
Bailey was a staunch anti-communist. Indeed, in 1975, when I first voted for
him, Bailey was, allegedly, an active member of the New Zealand chapter of the
World Anti-Communist League (WACL) a sinister, far-right outfit with its
origins in Chiang Kai-shek’s Republic of China (Taiwan).
Reading between the lines of Bailey’s obituary, it would
seem that his far-right views had, by the early 1980s, become so extreme (WACL
was exposed as having ties to neo-Nazi death-squads) that even in Rowling’s
broad Labour church they could no longer be tolerated. Amid the dramatic
upheavals of 1981 – the year of the Springbok Tour – Bailey was somehow
prevailed upon to step aside for the affable (and considerably more moderate)
lawyer, Bill Jeffries.
The curious career of Ron Bailey illustrates just how widely
the net of Labour’s candidate recruitment was flung in the 1950s and 60s. The
party was very far from being a monolithic organisation for the very simple
reason that its core working-class and professional middle-class constituencies
were themselves anything but monolithic. Staunch anti-communist trade unionists
like Bailey were joined in Labour’s caucus by radical Christian socialists like
Hastings MP, Richard Mayson. The social-conservative Kirk sat at the same
Cabinet Table as the social-radical Finlay.
For those politicians who prefer their parties to cleave to
just one line, Labour’s “broad church” must sound like hell-on-earth. As a
left-wing Labour Party activist – against whom the Rogernomics-supporting
“Backbone Club” (of which Ron Bailey was the Auckland convenor) regularly
hurled thunderbolts, I can certainly vouch for it being a very hard slog.
What I must also vouch for, however, is that even in a
disastrous election year, like 1975, Labour’s “broad church” could still
attract 39.6 percent of the popular vote.
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 10 February 2017.
