Perp Walk? Ruth Dyson moves towards the stage of the
Dunedin Town Hall after defeating Jim Anderton for the Labour Party Presidency
by 572 to 473 votes. Saturday, 3 September 1988.
THE LAST TIME the NZ Labour Party held its conference in
Dunedin the stakes could not have been higher. Those for whom the Labour Party
represented democratic-socialism were pitted against those for whom the Labour
Party represented electoral pragmatism and the fulsome praise of New Zealand’s
leading capitalists. In other words, it was a straight-out fight between the
Left and the Right.
Tragically, the Right won.
Had Jim Anderton been elected President of the party (as he
would have been, had the Engineers’ Union boss, Rex Jones, cast his 55 votes
with the other affiliated unions supporting Jim) there would have been no
NewLabour Party, and New Zealand Labour would become a Corbyn-style left-wing
party long before its British namesake.
Anderton’s plan was simple: to have his allies on the
Executive and Council of the party oversee the de-selection of the leading
exponents of “Rogernomics” (Roger Douglas, Richard Prebble, Michael Bassett,
Mike Moore) and ensure that their replacements were reliable opponents of the
far-right policies these “Rogernomes” had introduced.
Anderton was well aware that de-selection would trigger a
full-scale crisis within the party. Richard Prebble had already shown how far
the right of the party was prepared to go by legally injuncting Labour's governing NZ
Council from installing a hostile (but duly elected) electorate
committee in his Auckland Central seat. At that time (May 1988) it was made
clear to the party organisation that Roger Douglas’s supporters in the Labour
caucus were willing to split the party rather than see Labour return to its
traditional left-wing beliefs.
Anderton’s strategy was to call their bluff – precipitating
their defection from the Labour Party. They would, presumably, be followed by
their supporters in the Labour Party electorate committees and branches. Such a
course of action would, in all likelihood, have caused the government to fall,
requiring an early general election. Labour, purged of its free-market cuckoos,
would have been free to run as its old self. The Rogernomes’ new party, hamstrung
by the First-Past-The-Post electoral system, would have been defeated, and the
Labour Left would have come into its inheritance.
The Labour “centrists”, led by Helen Clark, were horrified
by the prospect of Labour moving so decisively to the Left. They may have hated
Roger Douglas and his allies, but they feared Jim Anderton and his comrades
much more. Rather than see the party split to the right, they prevailed upon
the Rogernomes and their hard-line supporters in the infamous “Backbone Club”
to acquiesce in the election of Ruth Dyson. The centrists hoped that Dyson, a
senior party office holder with an honourable left-wing past, would encourage
just enough of the rank-and-file to remain loyal to David Lange and his
government - thereby ruining Anderton’s plans. Which is exactly what happened.
Did Clark and her centrist allies understand that by
ensuring Anderton’s defeat they would be making a split to the left well-nigh
inevitable? Almost certainly. But why would that worry them? Their strategic position
would be secured by Anderton’s and the Labour Left’s departure. Moreover, the
party’s inevitable defeat in 1990 would make it possible for them to
appropriate Anderton’s de-selection strategy and make it their own in the
run-up to 1993. The hapless Mike Moore could be duped into carrying the can for
Labour right up until the moment Clark had the numbers to depose him – which
she duly did just weeks after the 1993 General Election.
The Labour Party that last weekend (2-4 November 2018) returned to Dunedin,
thirty years after the dramatic events of September 1988, is the inheritor of
all that ideological and personal treachery. What’s more, it is a party that
has never confronted and acknowledged its own wretched complicity in the events
that inflicted so much harm upon its supporters back in the 1980s. It came very close in
2012 – at the Annual Conference held at Ellerslie – but, once again, a
frightened leadership saw to it that the past remained unexamined. A pity,
because as any theologian or psychotherapist will attest: sins unrepented have
a nasty habit of repeating themselves.
In this regard, it was certainly fascinating to read Richard
Harman’s account of the 2018 Annual Conference in Dunedin. The most notable
feature of which he described as the “airbrushing” of Helen Clark out of
Labour’s recent history:
“The weekend Labour conference saw the party rule a line
under the last 30 or 40 years of its turbulent past and launch what in effect
is a new Labour Party.”
Harman argues that “the new ‘progressive’ party is very much
the product of the leader, Jacinda Ardern, with a new emphasis on pragmatism
and the realities of MMP coalition government.”
The political legacies of Lange, Palmer, Moore and Clark
went unacknowledged, says Harman: “[T]hat would have brought back too many
horrific memories of the last time the party had a conference in Dunedin in
1988 and nearly ripped itself in two over Rogernomics.”
What Harman doesn’t say is that the only reason such
political legerdemain is even possible is because Jacinda Ardern is such an
extraordinary electoral asset. Single-handed, she has resurrected Labour’s
morale; refilled her coffers, boosted her membership, and filled her activist
base with confidence and delight. Her “relentlessly positive” personality is
like a powerful spotlight, illuminating brilliantly that little part of
Labour’s stage upon which she sits and smiles. Meanwhile, in the darkness her
brilliance does so much to render impenetrable, the party leadership does all
within its power to render a genuine shift to the left impossible.
It is fitting, in a way, that the decision to free the
caucus from its crucial constitutional obligation to uphold the party’s
manifesto – its policy platform – was taken in Dunedin. Justified as a
practical and necessary concession to the exigencies of MMP, it nevertheless
severs the last of the ties that bind the parliamentary wing to the party
organisation. The caucus is now officially “Corbyn proof”. Thirty years after
stabbing her in the back, the centrists have finally summoned-up the courage to
drive the dagger of pragmatism deep into Labour’s democratic-socialist heart.
This essay was posted
simultaneously on The Daily Blog and Bowalley
Road of Tuesday, 6 November 2018.
