A Change Gonna Come (Labour Abandons Neoliberalism)

A New Day Dawns: At it's Annual Conference in Auckland last weekend (15-17 October) the NZ Labour Party finally and decisively abandoned its 26-year experiment with Neoliberalism.

IT BEGAN, as so many things do, with words on a page. Seated in the sprawling foyer of Auckland’s Aotea Centre, I was flicking through the pages of the Labour Party’s "Policy Framework" document, when suddenly it struck me. These weren’t words of continuity – these were words of change.

As a former trade unionist, the first section I always turn to in any Labour policy document is the section dealing with industrial relations.

Now, about the best one can say of the employment reforms enacted by Helen Clark’s government was that they were a cautious improvement on the infamously harsh Employment Contracts Act. But the policy I was reading in the foyer of the Aotea Centre last Friday evening was anything but cautious. Dammit – this stuff was radical.

What Labour is proposing is nothing less than restoring to the many thousands of workers currently lacking an active voice in their workplace the right to engage in collective bargaining. Across entire industries minimum pay-rates and conditions will again apply. State-facilitated and binding arbitration will again be made available to both employers and employees. For nearly quarter-of-a-century, New Zealanders rights in the workplace have been unconscionably abridged, Labour is promising to restore them.

My fellow journalists hadn’t missed these proposed changes. Eyebrows were raised. Clearly, this Labour Conference was going to be different.

They weren’t wrong. In the bars and cafes of the Auckland CBD, where many of the 600 registered delegates gathered that night to catch up and compare notes since last year’s conference in Rotorua, there was a palpable sense of excitement. Those who had been most closely involved in the drafting of the new policy framework all wore the same expression of quiet satisfaction. I half expected them to break into Sam Cooke’s haunting anthem: "It’s been a long, a long time coming, but I know a change gonna come."

By Saturday lunchtime it was becoming clear just how dramatically things were changing. Policies which had once been the preserve of a handful of persistent dissidents were now being forcefully promoted from the top-table.

In one session, I witnessed what I thought I’d never see: left-wing unionists and staunch Labour members enthusiastically applauding businessmen and economists. The combined message of Selwyn Pellett, John Walley and Ganesh Nana: that the neoliberal experiment had failed, and that it was time to reclaim New Zealand’s economic sovereignty by helping the export sector repay New Zealand’s mountainous debt; was fast becoming the theme of the conference.

The raw emotion of business journalist and commentator, Bernard Hickey’s, address to conference delegates brought tears to more than one hardened observer’s eyes. His potent mixture of dire economic prophecy and unashamed patriotism moved even Labour’s usually irrepressible finance spokesman, David Cunliffe, to tell Hickey’s audience, in choked tones: "You will remember this day."

Perhaps it was simply the fact that this was the conference of a party in opposition that contributed so forcefully to the impression of an organisation vigorously exercising its limbs – and mind – after a dangerously long period of enforced restraint. Personally, I think there was more to it than that. Personally, I think what I witnessed over the weekend was the long-awaited lifting of Helen Clark’s shadow from the New Zealand Labour Party.

No one has ever dominated Labour so thoroughly or for so long as Helen Clark. Her great historical achievement was to keep it together after the bitter divisions of the Rogernomics Era and the defection of its left and right wings. But, like all great achievements, hers came at a high cost: the surrender of the Party’s freedom to the leadership.

This was the conference where the Party won it back.

But it did not win it back at the expense of its current leadership – it won it back with the leadership's active and eloquent support.

In the course of just 22 months Andrew Little has transformed himself from dour union boss into a party president capable of both passion and (who knew?) humour. In contrast to last year’s rather wooden presidential address, Mr Little this year gave voice to genuine political oratory.

But, it was left to Phil Goff to set the capstone on the edifice of change which, by Sunday morning, Labour’s 2010 conference had become – and he did not disappoint. In what was undoubtedly the best Labour speech in thirty years the Leader of the Opposition finally and with considerable eloquence announced the end of Labour’s 26-year long neoliberal experiment.

Recalling the New Zealand of his youth where "the rungs of the ladder reached down to where everybody grew up" Labour’s leader pledged to make "a place at the table" for every New Zealander.

"I believe this", he said, as his party rose to its feet. "We can do this!"

It was a long time coming, but change had come at last.

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 19 October 2010.