A Fading Rose: Labour’s villains have become banal, and her heroes are dead and gone. For me, the party’s annual conference no longer beckons. Fortunately, there’s plenty to keep me busy in my garden. This year’s roses are a particularly vivid shade of red.
I SHOULD BE at the Labour Party’s annual conference. I fully
intended to attend. I’d received the usual e-mail inviting me to apply for
media accreditation. But, with the deadline looming, I just couldn’t do it.
Wearing a media pass around my neck this year would have
felt hypocritical – inauthentic. Labour conferences have never been just
another journalistic assignment for me. Ever since I cast my first vote (more
than 40 years ago now, God help me!) Labour’s cause has been my cause.
Regardless of whether I was attending as a delegate, or a journalist, Labour
conferences mattered.
It’s why I worked so hard to get to them. As the only
political organisation in New Zealand with a realistic prospect of actually
improving the lives of working people, the internal life of the Labour Party
has, for me, always been a matter of huge significance.
As a journalist, I never found the official conference
speeches of much interest. What mattered to me were the conversations with rank-and-file
delegates; the policy workshop debates on economics, trade and foreign affairs
[all closed to media this weekend] and the chance to get some idea of who was
on the rise and who was on the way out. I never got the impression that more
than a handful of the journalists in attendance were remotely interested in any
of these things, but for me this annual pulse-taking was invaluable.
I kept coming back for more because I never went away from a
Labour conference disappointed. At the grass-roots level of the party there was
always a sense of optimism. No matter what the setbacks, I never got the sense
that Labour’s forward march had been halted.
Even at the annual conference following the rout of the
Fourth Labour Government in 1990, delegates could point to established leaders
like Helen Clark and Michael Cullen, and to new MPs like Steve Maharey, Pete
Hodgson and Leanne Dalziel, and tell me with considerable confidence that
Labour’s sun would rise again. And, of course, nine years later, with a lot of
help from the Alliance, it did.
Even with the departure of Clark and Cullen, the party’s
confidence remained undimmed. Indeed, between 2008 and 2014 I detected an
exciting groundswell of rank-and-file assertiveness. There were hundreds in the
party who, with Clark safely ensconced in New York, were determined that their
party should, once again, become the driving force of progressive change in New
Zealand. These were great conferences to attend.
Two individuals stood out in this headlong rush for a Labour
rebirth: Helen Kelly and David Cunliffe. Like those undaunted delegates in
1990, Labour activists looked to them in confident expectation of another
brilliant sunrise. It was not to be.
Maybe that was it – the reason why, on the afternoon of
Tuesday, 1 November, I just couldn’t fill in my accreditation form. Helen was
gone, and now David was going. Labour’s bright sunlit morning had turned into a
grey rainy day.
Yes, the delegates will all be there in the conference hall
this weekend. The workshop debates will splutter and stutter to some sort of
conclusion. Party vacancies will be filled, reports presented, and Andrew will
deliver his speech. Except, this time, the political drama’s script will not
have been written by a Kirk, a Lange, a Clark, or even a Roger Douglas, but by
a committee.
Labour’s villains have become banal, and her heroes are dead
and gone. For me, the party’s annual conference no longer beckons. Fortunately,
there’s plenty to keep me busy in my garden. This year’s roses are a particularly
vivid shade of red.
This essay was
published jointly on Bowalley Road
and The Daily Blog on Sunday, 6
November 2016.
