National Attacks Unions ... Again. How Will Labour Respond?

Other Options: If Labour fails to meet National's latest challenge to the right of workers to trade union protection, then other, less timid, political forces will step into the political space they have chosen to vacate. The dialectic does not sleep.

“YOU MAY NOT BE INTERESTED in the dialectic,” quipped Leon Trotsky, “but the dialectic is interested in you.” As the National Party prepares to introduce yet another tranche of employer-friendly changes to New Zealand’s labour relations law, Labour will be required to respond. What will that response be? Will it continue to promote policies that have hardly changed in 25 years? Will it go on behaving as if the charges laid against the trade union movement of the 1970s and 80s were true? Or, will it serve notice on the Employers that: if they persist in attacking and undermining the trade union movement legislatively, then Labour and the other parties of the Left will be forced to retaliate in kind?

Here’s a tip. If you expect the current leaders of the Labour Party to do anything more than mutter: “Tut, tut! Nasty National Party! Why are you being so mean to the poor little unions?” Well, you’re dreaming.

It’s the party’s labour relations spokesperson, Darien Fenton, that I feel sorry for. Her instincts, as a former trade union secretary, are generally pretty reliable. I strongly suspect that, if her caucus colleagues would only let her, she’d come out strongly in favour of a full-scale counter-attack against National’s legislatively-driven union-busting. But, of course, her caucus colleagues won’t do that because, like the former SUP leader whose advice on industrial law Labour has followed consistently since 1987: “they would rather keep control of the losing side, than lose control of the winning side”.

To the middle-class professionals at the summit of the Labour Party the very idea of re-empowering working people in the workplace, and restoring a semblance of balance to the employment relationship, is anathema. Why? Because it would very quickly lead to a massive recovery of working-class confidence – and that is not something the current crop of Labour politicians are either personally or ideologically equipped to deal with.

The litmus test of a Labour politician's commitment to genuine labour relations reform is whether or not they support universal union membership. It was the introduction of universal membership by the First Labour Government in 1936 that instantly evened-up the balance of social forces in depression-ravaged New Zealand, and its re-introduction in 2014 would have exactly the same effect. For most Labour MPs, however, universal membership (or, as they insist on calling it, “compulsory unionism”) has become what the Americans call a “third-rail” issue: touch it and die.

“Far better,” they parrot, “to have members by conviction than compulsion.” The fact that we have had “members by conviction” for the past 20 years, during which private-sector union density in New Zealand has fallen from just under 50 percent in the mid-1980s to less than 10 percent currently, makes not the slightest impression on their thinking. It’s as though “voluntary unionism”, far from being a busted flush, is still a viable experiment in progress – and they’re just waiting to see how it turns out. Not even the Council of Trade Unions’ graph showing the inverse correlation between union density and the share of national income controlled by the “One Percent” has dented their absolute certainty that a restoration of universal membership is neither feasible nor desirable.

And yet, raising the age of eligibility for National Superannuation was once declared to be a “third-rail” issue, but that didn’t prevent Labour going into the last election with a policy of lifting the age of eligibility from 65 to 67. The same used to be said about the introduction of a Capital Gains Tax, but, once again, Labour (alongside the Greens) campaigned in 2011 for its introduction. Strange, isn’t it, that policies applauded by the Centre and the Right are deemed worthy of risking the electorate’s wrath, but those associated with the Left are not?

A genuine Labour Party would have little difficulty in both formulating and promoting a campaign for universal membership. Recent and current disputes have driven home to the public the considerable legal powers available to employers and the corresponding vulnerability of employees in the post-union workplace. Is the Labour Party of 2012 really so much less capable than the nineteenth century Liberal Party that it cannot draft a comprehensive set of progressive labour reforms? Is there no one in its ranks equal in eloquence to the Rev. Rutherford Waddell, whose famous sermon, “The Sin of Cheapness”, led to the setting up of the Sweating Commission and recruited even middle-class reformers to the unions’ cause?

Labour does not even seem to possess anyone with the political smarts to approach National quietly and say: “Listen you guys, if you’re stupid enough to introduce this latest round of anti-union legislation, we’ll be forced to announce a comprehensive reform package of our own – which, we assure you, your friends the employers will not like. Why don’t we both agree to simply let sleeping dogs lie?” It wouldn’t be a very courageous, or ethical, way of operating, but it would probably work. [The same strategy would, of course, succeed in relation to the Government’s plans for “partial” privatisation. A constantly re-stated pledge to take the assets back into 100 percent public ownership would seriously dampen investor enthusiasm. And yet, Mr Shearer insists on telling potential investors: “Once they’re gone, they’re gone for good.” Such a helpful fellow.]

It is one the great ironies of recent political history that the Right has learned the lessons of effective left-wing propaganda more thoroughly than the Left itself. Groups like the Business Roundtable and the Maxim Institute have always understood the enormous power of ideas, and how an argument well-researched, well-presented, and then powerfully and consistently advocated, will almost always shift public opinion in the desired direction. Copious evidence of exploitation, poverty-level wage-rates and oppressive employer conduct is available to any Labour MP willing to sit down for an hour with any union organiser. And any employment lawyer will succinctly list for them the insurmountable legal barriers to effective union protection. The only thing preventing Labour from campaigning for the comprehensive restoration of fairness in the workplace is its own, selfish, disinclination to meaningfully empower the party’s electoral base.

Labour’s disinclination to lead effective action to assist working people will not, however, prevent such action being proposed and, ultimately, taken. National and its employer mates have need of these proposed reforms precisely because, in the current economic climate, the profitability of their firms cannot be preserved except at the expense of their employees. But workers barely earning enough to cover basic living expenses now, cannot afford to accept a future in which they are paid, in real terms, even less. Like the response of the Greeks and the French to the policies of austerity, low-paid New Zealanders’ response to falling living standards will be to turn to the political parties of the Left for support. If Labour wants to know what a future based on surrendering to the power of the bosses looks like, it need only consider the fate of PASOK, the Greek Socialist Party. In 2009 it won 44 percent of the popular vote. In 2012, after allowing itself to become the IMF’s, the ECB’s and the EU’s bailiff, it won just 13 percent.

As Trotsky knew only too well: the dialectic is never uninterested in human affairs, and it never sleeps.

This posting is exclusive to the Bowalley Road blogsite.

In A Weakened State

Insufficient Evidence: The failure of New Zealand's national security apparatus to acquire the human intelligence (and thus the eye-witness evidence) to convince a jury of the defendants' guilt in the Urewera Terror Trial has exposed serious weakenesses in the protective institutions of the New Zealand State.

Salus populi suprema lex
The safety of the people shall be the highest law
Cicero

THE DECISION NOT TO RE-TRY the “Urewera Four” sets the capstone on a comprehensive failure of New Zealand’s national security apparatus. At almost every level, the public has witnessed examples of ignorance, indecision and incompetence that agencies similarly placed in poorer and more marginalised countries would look at askance. After the Urewera debacle, it is debateable whether New Zealand even has a national security apparatus. That twenty or so highly politicised individuals could be observed undertaking military training with lethal weapons, on tribal lands with a long and strong tradition of resistance to the New Zealand state, for close to a year, and still manage to escape serious convictions, certainly argues against the proposition.

At the heart of this failure lies a paucity of intelligence. (And I’m using the word here in its double sense of intellectual sophistication and useable knowledge.) New Zealanders have been seriously let down by the tradition of anti-intellectualism that pervades our security services. It has fostered an institutional environment in which anyone possessing a sophisticated understanding of this country’s history and culture is treated with hostility and suspicion. Doubly so, if that knowledge extends to anything more than a superficial grasp of left-wing and/or right-wing theory and practice. It’s an environment in which the received “wisdom” of our (often even more ignorant) American and Australian allies counts for much more than specialised local knowledge.

Assistant Police Commissioner, Jon White’s, operationally brutal and strategically idiotic raid on the sleepy Tuhoe village of Ruatoki destroyed any chance the Crown might have had of mounting a successful prosecution of the fledgling Urewera guerrilla force. The NZ Police utterly underestimated the vigour and sophistication of the Left’s propaganda capabilities and, from the very beginning, were forced to play “catch-up” in the struggle for hearts and minds.

The other fatal flaw in Operation Eight was its (no doubt US inspired) fascination and reliance on technologically acquired intelligence. Neither the Police Security Intelligence Unit (PSIU) nor the Security Intelligence Service (SIS), appear to have anything remotely resembling an effective spy network. Indeed, in this regard, New Zealand’s private sector intelligence gatherers seem to be well ahead of the State’s. This lack of human intelligence drove the Police to what were subsequently deemed to be reckless and illegal attempts to acquire persuasive evidence of criminal intent.

Also lacking were the reliable media “assets” so highly prized by the British security services. Individuals to whom key elements of the Crown’s case might have been judiciously leaked as a way of counter-acting the Defence’s extremely skilful use of sympathetic journalists strategically located throughout the news media. Our own security services appear utterly unaware of the role social media and the Internet play in shaping public opinion. Where, for example, was the Crown’s equivalent of Wikileaks? Clearly no one was prepared to play the role of Private Bradley Manning by dumping all the evidence denied to the Prosecution on a suitably insulated and legally untouchable website.

From the very beginning of Operation Eight it should have been clear that the Crown was engaged in a full-scale political battle with the individuals behind the Urewera Training Camps and their supporters in the wider left-wing community. Every one of the agencies tasked with protecting our national security: the PSIU, the SIS, the Officials Committee for Domestic and External Security Co-ordination  (ODESC) and the Combined Threat Assessment Group (CTAG) individually and collectively failed to meet this political test.

Bluntly, the accused’s’ defence team and their tireless army of propagandists ran rings around the Crown. They not only won a significant political victory in terms of the “Urewera Four” case, but their undeniable success in making the Crown look both weak and stupid will very likely deter its servants from attempting anything similar for many years to come. It will require a very brave Police Commissioner indeed to repeat Howard Broad’s gutsy call of 2007.

Nor will Tuhoe, and the Maori nationalist movement generally, be content to rest upon their laurels. Already we’re hearing demands for a Crown apology to, and massive compensation for, the traumatised residents of Ruatoki. Pressing forward from one victory towards another has always been an intelligent strategy – both politically and militarily. The Crown, already in full retreat, will be harried unceasingly by a Tuhoe nation intent on reclaiming as much lost land and mana as possible.

The New Zealand State has been seriously weakened by its failure to convince a jury that what was happening in the Ureweras constituted a clear and present danger to our national security. The Crown’s prosecutors appeared almost entirely ignorant of the philosophical, ideological and historical arguments which have, in other parts of the world, persuaded hitherto peaceful individuals to embrace the theory and practice of political violence. Where were the Crown’s expert witnesses? Why were no academics from the USA or the UK called to tell the Jury how and why people become terrorists? The defence team’s carefully fostered notions that Tame Iti and his comrades posed no sort of threat to the Queen’s Peace, and that the charges levelled against him were farcical, were never adequately challenged by the prosecution – and they stuck.

Partly, this is explained by the failure of the Police to supply the Crown with the right sort of evidence. But the prosecution’s ham-fisted use of the evidence it did possess reflected the susceptibility of even the Crown’s lawyers to the “two worlds” argument advanced by the defence. The latter insisted, with all the silky conviction a skilful barrister can muster, that events which looked like military exercises when viewed through Pakeha eyes, appeared no more dangerous than a job creation scheme when viewed through Maori eyes.

To insist that people running around with guns and balaclavas were terrorists, warned the defence, was to revisit upon these noble Maori “reformers” all the sins of our colonial fathers. According to their lawyers, the accused weren’t training to be terrorists. No, they were training to be security guards in Somalia and Iraq! This preposterous argument convinced not only at least one of the jurors, but also, seemingly, the Crown itself. Guilty verdicts on the most serious charges, it was cleverly insinuated, would be proof positive that Pakeha racism had triumphed. Not surprisingly, on the most serious charge - belonging to an illegal organisation - the Jury was hung.

Russel Fairbrother, Tame Iti’s lawyer, has hailed the Crown’s decision not to re-try his client as a victory for the New Zealand justice system. But there is another, much less sanguine, way of looking at the Crown’s capitulation. If, under the rubric of “national security” one includes the preservation of New Zealand as a unitary, constitutionally-coherent state in which the safety of every citizen is guaranteed by the rule of law, and where the state, and only the state, is permitted to maintain and train armed forces, then the Crown’s decision, and the lamentable way it has conducted itself throughout the entire Urewera affair, gives cause for grave concern.

A group of armed individuals, who gave every appearance of levying war against the Crown, have somehow escaped serious convictions. This entirely unsatisfactory outcome sets an extremely dangerous precedent. We should not feel in the least bit reassured that, ultimately, the guerrillas in the Urewera mist failed to inflict any harm on their fellow citizens. Next time (and given the extraordinary failings of our national security apparatus a ‘next time’ cannot be discounted) we may not be so lucky.

This posting is exclusive to the Bowalley Road blogsite.

Lengthening Shadows

The Sons of Cain: Youthful members of the Greek fascist party, The Golden Dawn, celebrate the news that their party has won 21 seats in the Greek Parliament. The frantic efforts of neoliberal European financiers and politicians to shore up the Eurozone is opening the door to extremist political parties not seen since the 1930s. The promoters of austerity have sown dragons teeth.

FRANCE has a new, socialist, president. Greece, no government at all. The world’s stock markets oscillate between greed and fear. Only the world’s editorialists seem content to reassure us that, in spite of appearances, very little has – or will – change.

But, if they’re right, then we are all imperilled.

Because all those reassuring editorials are based on one, chilling, assumption: that democratic politics no longer has the power to countermand the world’s bond dealers and currency traders. That, in any showdown between the power of the people, and the power of global financial markets: it’s the people who will lose.

Except they won’t – not in the long run. Because, if the weapons of democracy fail them, the people won’t stop fighting, they’ll simply reach for new, undemocratic, weapons.

The editorial writers of The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, and even our own New Zealand Herald, in their rush to shore up the crumbling intellectual edifice of neoliberalism, and downplay the significance of the French and Greek elections, have failed to digest all of the news emerging from those contests.

In their eagerness to paint Monsieur François Hollande as some sort of professional, weak-kneed, say-one-thing-on-the-hustings-but-do-another-in-the-Elyseé-Palace French politico, they have forgotten who helped him across the line in the crucial run-off ballot. It was the Front National, the supporters of Marine Le Pen, who, either by abstention or active rejection, sealed the fate of President Nicolas Sarkozy.

If the global financial markets make it impossible for Monsieur Hollande to keep faith with the French electorate. If the overweening power of German capital is permitted to humiliate and “discipline” France’s leader – to the profound dismay of his countrymen, then to whom, exactly, do you think they will turn? Certainly not to the Socialist Party, nor to the equally discredited Gaullists. No, they will turn in their hundreds of thousands to the party of the Far Right. The Party that would tear up the treaties binding France to the European Union. The party that would close the borders of France, not simply to immigrants, but to the exports of France’s neighbours. The party that would bring the Eurozone, and the dream which inspired its creation, crashing down in the name of economic nationalism and “France pour les français!”

Those editorial writers also appear to have missed the ominous success of The Golden Dawn. These Greek fascists, with their Nazi-style salutes and their Hellenic version of the Swastika, won 21 seats in the Greek Parliament last Sunday. Their nostalgia for the days when the Colonels ran Greece, and the jails were filled with leftist intellectuals and trade union activists, casts a grim shadow not only over Greek politics, but over the whole of Europe.

The neoliberals’ hatred of history blinds them to the fact that the world has stood before where it stands today. In the 1930s: in the midst of the Great Depression; with millions unemployed; and the political leaders of the “civilised world” unable to conceptualise any way out of the deepening economic crisis except to cut and cut and cut; the way was cleared for the extremist demagogues of Right and Left. Men who preached the primacy of politics over economics: politicians who specialised in identifying scapegoats; butchers who slew them in their thousands.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt. His stimulus package, known as the New Deal, rescued American capitalism from its enemies to the Left and the Right, and made Keynesian economics the default setting of Western governments for nearly fifty years.

The one great exception to the economic folly of deflation and austerity was the administration of President Franklin Roosevelt. His “New Deal” offered a “third way” between the Scylla of Italian and German fascism and the Charybdis of Soviet communism. In faraway Sweden, and here in New Zealand, social-democratic governments followed Roosevelt’s lead – constructing societies that became the envy of the world.

Too many nations did not. Inevitably, the world was rescued from economic failure by that most terrible and irresistible of “stimulus packages”. Those who had declined the peaceful path to economic success were subjected to the awful audit of war.

There are worse things than fiscal deficits.

How does one account for millions of human losses?

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, 11 May 2012.

A Quiet Sunday Afternoon In Blockhouse Bay

Reddening The Burbs: If anyone can persuade the quiet suburbs of New Zealand to accept and embrace the need for change, it’s David Cunliffe.

BLOCKHOUSE BAY is one of those suburbs you drive through without taking much notice. It’s a quiet, tidy community that minds its own business and expects you to do the same. The houses are modest, the hedges trimmed, the lawns mowed and the streets clean. The trendy eateries and funky stores that characterise Ponsonby and Grey Lynn are not in evidence here. Blockhouse Bay is not a fashionable suburb.

But the people who live in Blockhouse Bay, and the scores of suburbs just like it in cities across New Zealand, are important. They may not appear in the lifestyle sections of the Sunday papers, or feature in Metro magazine, but it’s the voters living in the Blockhouse Bays of this world who make and break Governments. Change the minds of the people who live in these unassuming urban communities, and you change the whole political environment. Win their hearts, and you win the country.

As I pulled into the car-park of the surprisingly large and well-appointed community centre at the end of Blockhouse Bay Road, a couple of Sunday’s ago, I wondered what I would discover inside. It had been many years since I attended a Labour Party branch meeting – twenty-five to be precise – and I pondered how much might have changed in that quarter-century.

As it turned out, the changes were minimal – surprisingly so. Gathered there were the same solid citizens that I remembered from my days in Dunedin’s Castle Street Branch. Women in hand-knitted cardigans; elderly gentlemen in caps and windbreakers; younger, professional types; earnest immigrants learning the ropes of politics. After twenty-five years, the rank-and-file of Labour seemed almost unchanged.

Not so the world that so many of them, filled with youthful idealism, had joined the party to improve. The New Zealand into which the majority of these people, now rapidly filling the spacious hall, had been born, half-a-century ago, has changed dramatically. And the bitter irony remains that it was Labour which set those changes in motion. In the great tsunami of reform unleashed by the government of David Lange and Roger Douglas, many of the achievements by which Labour had, for decades, defined itself were swept away. And it’s that menacing historical irony that squats, like a 900lb New Right gorilla, in the corner of every Labour Party gathering.

It was to slay that 900lb New Right gorilla that I had quit the Labour Party, alongside Jim Anderton and thousands of others, in 1989. Our defection was bitterly resented by many of those who opted to stay and fight the good fight from within. A surprising amount of that ill-feeling still persists in Labour’s ranks; so much that, without a personal invitation from the afternoon’s guest speaker, I would not have dreamed of turning up to a meeting of the New Lynn Women’s Branch.

The person these 70-80 people had come to hear was their local MP, David Cunliffe. In last year’s election Mr Cunliffe secured 16,999 votes, 5,190 more than his National Party opponent. In the Party Vote stakes, however, New Lynn, like so many other Labour-held seats in Auckland, went (by 749 votes) to the Nats.

The speech Cunliffe delivered to the New Lynn Women’s Branch on Sunday, 29 April  addressed that peculiar political schizophrenia head-on.

“When the right-wing party says that it’s going to cut your leg off,” Mr Cunliffe told his Labour Party audience, “voters want the left-wing party to say that it’s not going to cut your leg off. Voters don’t want to be told that the left-wing party is also going to cut your leg off, but cut it off a bit lower down and give you some anesthetic.

“I think that’s a major reason that nearly one million voters deserted us at the last election. It wasn’t because we failed to communicate our policies. Quite the opposite. Those voters saw that our policies – with the exception of asset sales – were mostly the same as National’s. So we can’t really be surprised at the result.”

That, in Labour Party terms, is fighting talk. In fact, it’s exactly the same sort of language Jim Anderton employed to attack Rogernomics more than twenty-five years ago. And, just as the Labour rank-and-file applauded Jim Anderton’s defence of core Labour values in the 1980s, so, too, did the Labour audience gathered together in the Blockhouse Bay Community Hall a couple of Sundays ago.

I drove home with three conclusions. One: the deeply cynical and self-destructive folly of Labour’s caucus in refusing to make Mr Cunliffe their leader. Two: the MP for New Lynn’s singular and radical understanding of the need to steer Labour into the new, fast-flowing tides of historical change. Three: if anyone can persuade the quiet suburbs of New Zealand to accept and embrace the need for change; it’s David Cunliffe.

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 8 May 2012.

Right versus ... Centre Right?!

A Dog In The Fight? Is Josie Pagani really the right (or should that be left) person to speak for one half of the entire political spectrum? Shouldn't Radio New Zealand-National's Nine-to-Noon programme attempt to broadcast ideologically, rather than party-politically, aligned representatives of the Left Bloc of New Zealand politics?

IS IT JUST ME, or is Josie Pagani sounding more and more like a wet member of the National Party caucus? Radio New Zealand–National’s Nine-to-Noon show invites this former Labour candidate onto the air every fortnight to represent the “Left” in a political discussion with the Right’s Matthew Hooton. The question is: Why?

Leaving aside Mr Hooton’s frequent and worrisome conflicts-of-interest. (I’ve lost count of the number of times he’s recused himself on the grounds that his Exeltium PR firm is currently representing a prominent newsmaker?) How in the name of “fair and balanced” do the producers of Nine-to-Noon justify Ms Pagani’s participation?

For a start (and given that she shares the “Left” spot with former Labour Party president, Mike Williams, this is not a problem Ms Pagani has all to herself) why does Nine-to-Noon allow members of political parties to speak for one half of the entire political spectrum? Is a former Labour Party candidate (and staunch political ally of one of David Shearer’s key advisers) ever likely to say anything remotely complementary about Hone Harawira’s Mana Party? Is she ever likely to offer anything but faint praise to the Greens? Not really. (Or, at least, not often.)

The commentators representing the Left and the Right should be ideological – not party political – representatives. Someone like Laila Harre, who, in her post-Alliance incarnation, served Nine-to-Noon as an acute and admirably dispassionate assessor of the Left’s overall performance, is what’s required. (Not now, of course, since she’s recently joined up with the Greens!)

As things now stand, the Left’s position is being “represented” by two people who stand well to the right of most Labour members and MPs. So far to the right, in fact, that someone visiting New Zealand from, say, France or Sweden, would have immense difficulty in identifying them as left-wing political analysts at all. Ms Pagani, in particular, constantly peppers her commentary with right-wing Kiwi catch-phrases like “nice-to-haves”, “Moroccan cooking courses” and “the people writing the cheques”.

For pity’s sake! All this does is legitimate the National Party’s critique of what little remains of Labour’s left-wing credentials, and moves the “mainstream” political frame even further to the right. Given that the programme’s host harbours a thinly-disguised (and, when revealed, quite visceral) antipathy towards the Left, one might have thought that Ms Pagani would make some effort to at least hold the line against the right-ward drift of “Overton’s Window”. Apparently not.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that Ms Pagani should never be invited to participate on Ms Ryan's programme, just that there are plenty of other non-partisan left-wingers Nine-to-Noon could approach. The CTU’s highly competent Helen Kelly and Peter Conway spring to mind. Or, the SFWU’s extraordinarily articulate Alastair Duncan. Up here in Auckland there’s Professor Jane Kelsey, while down in Dunedin there’s Dr Bryce Edwards and his political studies colleague (and Nights with Bryan Crump regular) Dr Brian Roper. Nine-to-Noon might even cock a snook at Afternoons With Jim Mora and recruit Martyn 'Bomber' Bradbury. Hell, I’d even nominate myself – if I didn’t know that Ms Ryan would rather drink rat poison and jump off the Skytower than have me anywhere near her show.

Radio New Zealand–National owes its listeners more than Nine-to-Noon’s anachronistic obsession with the “two main parties”. Politics under MMP isn’t driven by the two main parties, it’s driven by the two main blocs. Public radio’s listeners have a right to hear much more informed and dispassionate assessments of the relative strengths and weaknesses of the Left- and Right-wing blocs from commentators without a dog in the fight; and much less from those whose unfortunate pooches are getting bitten and bloody down in the ring.

This posting is exclusive to the Bowalley Road blogsite.

The Journey: A Political Memoir - Posting No. 4

Leading from The Front: HART's Otago-Southland Regional Organiser, Francesca Holloway, is arrested at a sit-down protest during the 1981 Springbok Tour of New Zealand. The Tour may have besmirched New Zealand's international reputation, but it secured something much more important - the re-election of Rob Muldoon's National Government.

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.

Tuesday, 11 August 1981.

IT WAS A TUESDAY AFTERNOON in August and I was supposed to be in court. As it was, I was facing a more daunting trial. A thousand Dunedin citizens were massing beneath the whitestone memorial to the dead of the South African War. As I pushed the crash helmet over my head and pulled on my gloves, I thought of my Grandfather. He had been a Captain in the Otago Mounted Rifles. In the wide expanses of the Natal he had fought the Boers. As a child I had grown familiar with is trophies: a Mauser rifle with Van Der Staad carved into the butt, had always fascinated me.

Lest We Forget.

I was in the front row. Why was I in the front row! My arms were tightly linked with those of the comrades on either side of me. Through the visor of my helmet I could see the thin blue line of police three hundred yards up the motorway – barring our passage to Carisbrook and the hated Springboks.

“Amandla! Amandla! Amandla Ngewhetu! Power! Power! Power to the People!” The demonstration was a single organism now. The tread of a two thousand feet keeping rhythm with the battle cry of the ANC. “Amandla! Amandla! Amandla Ngewhetu!”

Francesca Holloway, HART’s Otago-Southland regional organiser, ordered the column to halt. Nothing could now be heard except the steady breathing of the marchers. Twenty yards separated us from the line of police.

“Front row, ten paces forward!” Francesca gave the command.

We moved, the people behind followed, counting off the paces.

“Halt!”

Less than thirty feet from me a young constable stared fixedly at the beast with a thousand heads. There was fear in his eyes. He had good reason; one hundred yards further up the motorway the Blue Squad were waiting in full riot gear.

These cops in front of me are the bait. I thought to myself. They want us to break through.

“Front row, ten paces forward!” Francesca was playing chicken.

Machine-like, the line of constables drew their long batons. The marchers counted off the paces.

“Halt!”

Less than twelve inches separated us from the ends of the constables’ batons. There was hatred in their eyes now; I watched the knuckles of the man in front of me turn white. He wants to hurt me. I thought. He wants to hurt me very badly.

“Front row, five paces forward!”

“Get fucked Francesca!” It was my voice. I had no desire to have my ribcage shattered or my jaw broken. The front row did not move.

Human Buffers: Withdrawing ten paces, the protest demonstration of 11 August 1981 sent its marshalls forward to act as a human buffer between the line of police constables, batons drawn, and the demonstrators.

IT WAS NOW TUESDAY NIGHT. The crowd was smaller but more determined. We had blocked the street in front of the Southern Cross Hotel. The Springboks were inside.

“Right!” It was Francesca, and she was angry. “We’ve been well behaved all day. The time for good behaviour is over!”

The crowd cheered. They were angry too. The promise of the District Police Commander to allow the protesters within sight of the ground had been broken. They had turned us back on the motorway half a mile from Carisbrook. The crowd sat down on the wet roadway.

The Blue Squad were grinning as they formed-up in front of us. This was going to be fun. Their Commander ordered us to clear the road.

Nobody moved.

Somewhere back in the crowd a woman began very softly to sing the National Anthem.

In the bonds of love we meet

Francesca sat at the front of the crowd; legs crossed, arms folded, looking for all the world like a child at school. She was staring up defiantly at the line of police.

The Commander of the Blue Squad looked out over the crowd. There were grandmothers sitting there in the fine Dunedin drizzle; doctors, lawyers, university teachers, all of them singing their country’s hymn:

From dissension, envy, hate

and corruption guard out state

The Blue Squad moved back from the crowd. Their numbers were reduced. They retired to the hotel car park.

“Amandla! Amandla! Amandla Ngewhetu! Power! Power! Power to the People!”

I fell in love with Francesca that night.

A GREAT CROWD of onlookers had gathered as the drama on High Street unfolded. I looked at their faces. There were no doctors, no lawyers, no university teachers; they were the faces of ordinary working people. They jeered at the protesters, occasionally chanting “Rug –bee! Rug – bee!” What did we represent to them? Why were we on different sides?

You clever bastard, Muldoon. I muttered to myself. You’re going to win again.

This posting is exclusive to the Bowalley Road blogsite.

The Whole World Is Waking