A New Zealander Worth Remembering: Peter Conway was a man whose efforts in the cause of social justice touched the lives of a huge number of New Zealanders; a man who will be remembered and mourned by clothing workers and shop assistants, truck drivers and storepersons. Of him, the employers’ organisation, Business New Zealand, said: “Peter was an industrial leader of the highest integrity and his passing is a sad loss to New Zealand.”
THIS IS HOW IT IS NOW. This is the country we’ve become.
These are New Zealand’s priorities – even in the grim business of honouring the
dead.
A man, his wife and baby daughter, travelling by car along a
French highway, are reported to have veered into the path of an oncoming truck.
In the ensuing collision, the man and his wife are killed and their baby
seriously injured.
There is no other word for this bare summary of facts except
tragedy. To the family and friends of the deceased is owed the sympathy of all
decent and caring people.
Except that the victim of this tragic traffic accident was
something more than just a man – he was a former member of the All Blacks – New
Zealand’s world-beating rugby team. And that is why, for the past three or four
days, the country’s newspapers have given this story saturation coverage. The
life story of Jerry Collins, his history with both the Hurricanes provincial
rugby team and the All Blacks, is related in lavish detail, with considerable
empathy and undoubted pride. When his body arrives back in New Zealand, Jerry
Collins funeral service will attract thousands of mourners.
An 80-year-old lawyer dies following a six year struggle
with prostate cancer.
Once again, all decent people will acknowledge a life lived
well, and with considerable success in the nation’s courtrooms, and express
their deep regret at his passing.
Except this man was no ordinary lawyer, but the defender of
some of New Zealand’s most notorious criminals. Sir Peter Williams QC was the
barrister for Ron Jorgesson, the Bassett Road machine-gun murderer, and Terry
Clark – a.k.a “Mr Asia”. He also defended Arthur Alan Thomas, the man accused
of, and then ultimately pardoned for, the murders of Harvey and Jeanette Crewe.
President of the Howard League for Penal Reform for 30 years, Sir Peter was an
outspoken critic of the way New Zealand treated the men and women it locked up.
A bon vivant and wicked raconteur, he
will be remembered as one of this country’s most colourful legal practitioners.
We know all this because, aware of the seriousness of his
illness, the nation’s newspapers had prepared fulsome obituaries to mark his
passing.
A trade union leader loses his battle with acute depressive
illness.
In the NZ Herald
of 10/6/15 the death of Peter Conway, former Secretary of the New Zealand
Council of Trade Unions – at over 300,000 strong, this country’s largest
voluntary organisation – merited precisely 63 words.
More than 30 years devoted to improving the lives, wages and
working conditions of tens-of-thousands of New Zealand workers was considered
unworthy of even a photograph. The stories of how he campaigned alongside the
British miners in their doomed struggle against the government of Margaret
Thatcher; or, how he organised scores of young New Zealanders to travel to the
socialist republic of Nicaragua in the early 1980s to pick coffee under the
banner of “The Harry Holland Brigade”; neither of these warranted a mention.
Nor did the fact that in his 40s he went back to university to attain a
master’s degree in economics – the better to defend the interests of working
people against the bosses’ apologists. That he was a fine singer and
accomplished player of both the guitar and mandolin was, likewise, left out of
the tiny side-bar story.
Peter Conway was a man whose efforts in the cause of social
justice touched the lives of a huge number of New Zealanders; a man who will be
remembered and mourned by clothing workers and shop assistants, truck drivers
and storepersons. Of him, the employers’ organisation, Business New Zealand
said: “Peter was an industrial leader of the highest integrity and his passing
is a sad loss to New Zealand.” The Greens co-leader, Metiria Turei, recalled
that: “As Secretary of the Council of Trade Unions, Peter could still be found
running a picket line at 3 in the morning, he never shirked the hard work, and
never stopped fighting for a fairer New Zealand.” And, of his friend and
comrade, the former Secretary of the EPMU – now leader of the Labour Party –
Andrew Little said, simply: “He was a good man and he will be held in the
hearts of the labour movement.”
None of these tributes were considered worthy of quotation
by the NZ Herald, and, to be fair, by
most of the rest of the mainstream news media. Because, when all is said and
done, Peter was not an All Black, nor a renowned barrister – he was a trade
unionist.
The coverage of this fine New Zealander's death recalls to mind the following verses by James
K. Baxter, which seem to have been written for just such a man as Peter Conway:
The man who talks to the masters of Pig Island
About the love they dread
Plaits ropes of sand, yet I was born among them
And will lie some day with their dead.
This essay was
originally posted on The Daily Blog
of Wednesday, 11 June 2015.
