Despairing Of Reform: Dunedin-based Labour Party dissident, Tat Loo (aka "Colonial Viper") told fellow members of the Anderson's Bay-Peninsula Branch that the Labour Party "is now lost at sea but does not appear to recognise that fact." Their response was a vote to put the branch into recess. Loo advised his comrades that he wanted "no part of propping up the Thorndon Bubble careerist ‘pretend and extend’ set" and was "moving on to new political projects".
TAT LOO, like the ceremonial Chinese lion, is a potent
mixture of playfulness and ferocity. Intelligent, articulate, passionate,
politically impatient and singularly unwilling to suffer fools gladly, he set
his sights on the Dunedin Labour Party about three years ago – and has only
just run out of ammunition.
At a Special Formal Meeting of the Anderson’s Bay-Peninsula
Branch of the Labour Party held in South Dunedin on Sunday afternoon (22/11/15)
Loo and about twenty others announced that they were putting their
controversially resurrected branch back into the constitutional limbo from
which they had called it forth. Loo, himself, relinquished his executive role –
but not before using-up all his remaining shot and shells in a scathing
farewell to a Labour Party he had, finally, despaired of reforming.
“Several of the current officers and LEC delegates of the
ABP Branch have become deeply dissatisfied with the performance and direction
of the Labour Party both locally and in Wellington and no longer wish to remain
in their roles or continue supporting the party.” Loo explained in a posting on
the Labour-aligned political blog, The Standard.
“Labour’s inability to be consistent in opposing the neoliberal corporation-drafted
Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, the softening of the stance against the
90-day right to fire, the ethnically divisive and ineffective tactics against
Chinese property buyers in Auckland, the voting for National’s inequitable and
discriminatory social welfare reform legislation, and the support of National’s
spying and anti-terrorism bill,” said Loo, “all point to a Labour Party which
is now lost at sea but does not appear to recognise that fact.”
Loo’s conclusion was grim. “The palpable sense conveyed has
been that apart from minor tinkering, there are no likely or viable prospects
for positive, real progressive change coming from the Labour Party in the
foreseeable future.”
The veteran political journalist, Richard Harman, writing on
the POLITIK blog, suggested Loo’s departure was not something over which the
Labour hierarchy was likely to lose much sleep: “In fact [President Nigel]
Haworth and leader, Andrew Little, might well regard the move as a minor
victory in their quest to make the party more relevant to mainstream New
Zealand.”
According to Harman: “Anderson’s Bay was exactly the kind of
left wing Labour branch which enabled Jeremy Corbyn to become leader of the
British Labour party, a move which now threatens that party with divisiveness
and possible electoral ostracism.”
This is nonsense. Corbyn was nominated by a clear plurality
of “constituency organisations” – the equivalent of New Zealand Labour’s “LECs”
(Labour Electorate Committees). The disaffection in British Labour extended
throughout the entire party and its affiliated unions. Had support for Corbyn
been restricted to a handful of left-wing branches the 66-year-old backbencher
could never have been elected.
New Zealand’s “Corbyn Moment” came three years ago at the
2012 annual conference held at Ellerslie in Auckland, when the party
rank-and-file rebelled against the parliamentary caucus. It was around this
time that Loo’s public profile began to grow, especially after his Standard
pseudonym, “Colonial Viper”, was “outed” by Dunedin-based opponents of the
Labour Left’s champion, David Cunliffe – of whom Loo was a strong and vocal
supporter.
Indeed, it is almost certainly the “Peace of Palmerston
North” – shorthand for the restoration of more-or-less cordial relations
between the party rank-and-file and the parliamentary caucus that was plainly
in evidence at the party’s 2015 annual conference held in Palmerston North
earlier this month – that accounts for the timing of Loo’s decision to recess
the Anderson’s Bay-Peninsula Branch.
After the long list of political “sins” detailed in his
statement, Loo was clearly devastated by the party’s quiescent response to what
he saw as the Caucus’s continuing perfidy. The “revolutionary moment” had
clearly passed, and with it any good that the rebel Anderson’s Bay-Peninsula
Branch might have hoped to achieve. The curious failure of David Cunliffe to
fire in the 2014 election, and the catastrophic defeat it presaged, has reduced
the Labour Left to a demoralised and thoroughly chastened rump.
Time to go. Loo’s parting shot was delivered with
considerable accuracy at the Grant Robertson-led faction of the party, which,
he believes, is slowly-but-surely gaining the upper-hand in the Little-led
caucus. “We want no part of propping up the Thorndon Bubble careerist ‘pretend
and extend’ set any further and will be moving on to new political projects.”
Like Mao Zedong, Tat Loo is gathering what remains of his
revolutionary army and setting forth on his own “Long March” to Ya’nan.
This essay was posted
on The Daily Blog and Bowalley
Road of Wednesday, 25 November 2015.
