The Whiff of Testosterone

A Word in Your Ear, Nanny: The new language of masculinity which Phil Goff introduced at Labour's annual conference in Rotorua is absolutely crucial to regaining the attention, and then the loyalty, of the working-class male.

LABOUR’S 93rd ANNUAL CONFERENCE was about Phil Goff and the working-class male. After the stern, fifteen-year reign of Queen Helen I, how could it possibly have been about anything else?

And the whiff of testosterone that lingered over the Conference wasn’t simply the after-effects of Phil’s arrival outside Rotorua’s Energy Event Centre on Rick Barker’s Triumph. For the first time in a long time, the concerns, priorities and aspirations of working-class men were at the front of the policy queue. For these blokes, Labour’s 2008 defeat has been a sort of vindication: final proof that privileging a political discourse that either renders men invisible – or casts them as villains – comes with a very high electoral price-tag.

This new language of masculinity was clearly visible in the genuine and long-standing mateship between Phil Goff and the South Australian Labor Premier, Mike Rann. It was there in the blokey bonhomie of the Opposition leader’s new ideas man, the relentlessly positive John Pagani. You could read it in the solid union double-act of Andrew Little and Chris Flatt at the top-table. And you could hear it, at full-volume, in the deafening masculine roars unleashed by Phil and his retinue as they watched the Springboks hammer the All-Blacks, live, on an outsize TV screen at the Conference Dinner on Saturday night.

Most of all it was there in Phil’s keynote address to the Conference. His description of his widowed grandmother, a woman quite literally brought to her knees by the Great Depression, was telling: "She scrubbed floors for others to make ends meet for the family."

In that line we can still hear the caustic mixture of shame and rage experienced by working-class men and boys who could not rescue their wives and mothers from the humiliation of scrubbing the floors of their "betters".

In Phil’s words we also catch a glimpse of the Labour Party his grandparent’s generation voted for. It wasn’t a feminine construct. Blokes like Mickey Savage and Peter Fraser didn’t hazard their liberty for something as insufferably bourgeois as a "nanny".

No, the Labour Party of the 1930s and 40s was very much a masculine concept. In the eyes of its members and supporters, Labour was the working-class Leviathan: an unconquerable proletarian super-hero – sworn to secure the rights of the poor and downtrodden.

When Phil related how the Labour Party had "stood beside [his grandmother] when she needed it, and she never forgot that", the masculine symbolism was unmistakable. He’d presented the Party as defender and protector – the decent working-man who steps between the bully and his prey.

And the bullies of the 1930s were by no means exclusively male.

We are all familiar with the socialist caricatures of the oppressive boss and the rack-renting landlord, but few now remember that before the coming of the welfare state the "care of the poor" was routinely entrusted to organisations made up overwhelmingly of middle- and upper-class women.

All too often the wives of working men had to stand before the wives of their husbands’ employers and beg for assistance. Condescended to by the ladies of the hill, the women of the gullies had every reason to think of "charity" as something cold and judgmental.

Was the hostility directed against Labour’s "Nanny State" reforms by the party’s estranged working-class supporters a subconscious manifestation of these bitter class memories? Had Labour’s politicians become the "ladies on the hill" – talking down to their inferiors?

Flora Thompson, the British author whose books became the hit BBC television series Larkrise to Candleford, has her hero declare: "A man’s role is to conquer the world." To which her heroine archly responds: "Oh? And what is a woman’s role?" His instant (and grievously politically incorrect) reply is: "To love him for it."

In the 1930s – and again in the late-1960s and early 1970s – that became the dream of thousands of young and idealistic working-men. To conquer, if not the world, then at least the social evils which disfigure it. To protect and defend the weak and the oppressed – and to earn the love and respect of their female comrades in the process.

Can Phil Goff, who began his career as an hirsute red knight, astride a Norton Commando charger, persuade Labour to re-claim this heroic and very masculine tradition?

Can Labour, once again, become a party with balls?

This essay was originally published in The Dominion Post, The Timaru Herald, The Taranaki Daily News, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Evening Star of Friday, 18 September 2009.