No Time To Think: Ageing Boomers, Laurie & Les, Talk Politics.

“Members of Parliament don’t work for us, they represent us, an entirely different thing. As with so much that has turned out badly, the re-organising of MPs’ responsibilities began with the Fourth Labour Government. That’s when they began to be treated like employees – public servants – whose diaries had to be kept full-to-bursting, in case they found themselves with enough time on their hands to talk to their constituents and start thinking for themselves.”

“WHAT THIS PLACE NEEDS”, declared Les, depositing two brimming glasses of ale on the table, “is a fire”.

“Do pubs even have fires anymore?” Les’s friend Laurie replied, having carefully tested the quality of the beverage placed before him. “Haven’t open fires been banned?”

“Not all of them”, Les insisted, “a friend of mine was telling me only the other day about this pub with a brewery attached – or was it the other way round? – anyway, he swears there was a roaring open fire in the bar, and another one outside for the smokers.”

“However did they get that past the Fun Police? For God’s sake, don’t tell your Green Party mates, or they’ll be in there with buckets of water before you can say ‘Consent Variation’!”

“Truth to tell, Laurie, I don’t really have any friends in the Green Party, not anymore.”

“But you used to have heaps of Green Party ‘comrades’. I had to listen to you singing their praises for years. Hell, you even voted for them, if I recall correctly.”

“You do, Laurie, and I did – many times.”

“So, what went wrong?”

They did, mate. They did. When I had friends in the Greens, the party was led by Jeanette Fitzsimons and Rod Donald, and it boasted old lefties like Sue Bradford and Keith Locke in its ranks. Back then the Greens were eco-socialists – an ideology I was happy to vote for.”

“They’re still bloody eco-socialists as far as I can see.”

“Yeah, but when it comes to the Left you’ve never been able to see very clearly – have you Laurie?”

“So, what are they, if they’re not eco-socialists?”

“That’s a bloody good question! As far as I can make out, they’re an unholy mixture of Treaty-freaks, trans-gender defenders, and homespun, patchouli-scented, simple-lifers, deeply suspicious of anything ‘more complicated than a forge-bellows, a water-mill, or a hand-loom’.”

“What’s that? Tolkien?”

“It is indeed, Laurie, straight out of the prologue to The Lord of the Rings – ‘Concerning Hobbits’.”

“Hmmm”, Laurie mused, setting down his glass. “Nothing very Hobbitish about Julie Anne Genter’s performance in the House last week. Poor old Matt Doocey looked like he’d just been admonished by the Witch Queen of Angmar.”

“Well, it’s all in the hands of the Privileges Committee now. But, you know what? I actually feel sorry for JAG. She’s an enormously talented politician with a huge amount to offer.”

“Whether people want it or not.”

“Yes, yes, I know, she is prone to letting her political passions carry her away. But that’s a side-effect of the parliamentary life itself. Nobody should be expected to live that way – in that dreadful, hot-house, environment.”

“They’re paid well enough for putting up with it.”

“True. But it wasn’t always such a crazy pressure-cooker. I remember listening to Phil Amos – Minister of Education in the Kirk Labour Government – recalling the advice given to him when he was a brand new backbencher, way back in the early 1960s. He’d just been elected as the Member for Manurewa and had no idea what he was supposed to do. So, he called his boss, Arnold Nordmeyer, Leader of the Opposition. ‘Well,’ says Nordy, ‘we’ll have a caucus meeting sometime in February, and the Nats won’t call Parliament together until about June.’ (This is the beginning of December ’63, don’t forget.) ‘So, you just use the time to get to know your electorate.’”

“And we paid him for that?”

“Yes, we bloody did, Laurie, but not because he was our employee. Members of Parliament don’t work for us, they represent us, an  entirely different thing . As with so much that has turned out badly, the re-organising of MPs’ responsibilities began with the Fourth Labour Government. That’s when they began to be treated like employees – public servants – whose diaries had to be kept full-to-bursting, in case they found themselves with enough time on their hands to talk to their constituents and start thinking for themselves.”

“Yeah, well, as I said, they get paid more than most employees.”

“But don’t you get it? That’s the whole point! Phil Amos was a secondary-school teacher. His parliamentary stipend wasn’t a whole lot more than his old salary. That, and having time to talk and think, kept him grounded. Prevented him from melting-down like JAG.”

“By keeping him a safe distance from the fire.”

This short story was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 10 May 2024.

Just How ‘Broad’ Was Labour’s Church?

On The Right Of The Left: Raised in the public works camps of the Great Depression; organiser for the Workers Union; staunch anti-communist: Ron Bailey held the Heretaunga electorate in the Hutt Valley from 1960 until 1981. Few Labour parliamentarians have exemplified more vividly the ideological elasticity of Labour's "broad church".

 

THE FIRST LABOUR CANDIDATE I ever voted for was Ron Bailey. He’d inherited the Hutt Valley seat of Heretaunga from Labour’s outstanding Minister of Trade & Industry, Phil Holloway, in 1960. Encompassing a good part of the Hutt Valley’s manufacturing industries, the Heretaunga electorate was about as safe as any aspiring Labour MP could wish. Having won it, Heretaunga should have been Bailey’s for life.

 

Not that I knew anything about Ron Bailey as I conscientiously drew a line through the names of all the other candidates on my ballot paper. (I must confess, however, to hesitating over that of the Values Party candidate, J.M. Overton.) As a callow 19 year-old, I cared a great deal less about the personal histories of the candidates than I did about the parties they represented.

 

I cast my first vote for Labour in 1975 to honour Norman Kirk’s legacy. His leadership had impressed me tremendously. From the dispatch of a New Zealand frigate to the French atomic testing site at Mururoa, to the cancellation of the 1973 Springbok Tour, Kirk laid down a template for moral clarity and political courage by which I, and many thousands of other young New Zealanders, could judge his successors.

 

I was also voting for the self-evident decency of Kirk’s political heir, Bill Rowling; the progressive education policies of Phil Amos; and the radical social vision of Labour’s Attorney General, Dr Martyn Finlay. Theirs were the democratic socialist stars by which I allowed myself to be guided. Against such a flaring legacy, the star of Ron Bailey, Minister of Railways, shone only dimly.

 

Had I bothered to investigate the background of the man I was voting for, I would have been, by turns, both impressed and appalled.

 

Born in 1926, Bailey spent his childhood years in the infamous public works camps of the Great Depression. In his 2015 obituary of Bailey Dominion Post journalist Tom Fitzsimons describes the sort of places that five-year-old Ron would have called home: “His family lived in two conjoined gable-style tents with wooden floorboards, a corrugated-iron fireplace, no sink or bath, and kerosene lamps for light.”

 

Bailey’s political career didn’t really get started until he was 29, when he became an organiser for the New Zealand Workers Union. That was in 1956, and he must have impressed his fellow unionists as a go-getter because just four years later he was the Labour MP for Heretaunga.

 

If you’re thinking Bailey was some sort of socialist firebrand, then think again. Like so many of his conservative working-class contemporaries in both the unions and the Labour Party (including Kirk himself) Bailey was a staunch anti-communist. Indeed, in 1975, when I first voted for him, Bailey was, allegedly, an active member of the New Zealand chapter of the World Anti-Communist League (WACL) a sinister, far-right outfit with its origins in Chiang Kai-shek’s Republic of China (Taiwan).

Reading between the lines of Bailey’s obituary, it would seem that his far-right views had, by the early 1980s, become so extreme (WACL was exposed as having ties to neo-Nazi death-squads) that even in Rowling’s broad Labour church they could no longer be tolerated. Amid the dramatic upheavals of 1981 – the year of the Springbok Tour – Bailey was somehow prevailed upon to step aside for the affable (and considerably more moderate) lawyer, Bill Jeffries.

 

The curious career of Ron Bailey illustrates just how widely the net of Labour’s candidate recruitment was flung in the 1950s and 60s. The party was very far from being a monolithic organisation for the very simple reason that its core working-class and professional middle-class constituencies were themselves anything but monolithic. Staunch anti-communist trade unionists like Bailey were joined in Labour’s caucus by radical Christian socialists like Hastings MP, Richard Mayson. The social-conservative Kirk sat at the same Cabinet Table as the social-radical Finlay.

 

For those politicians who prefer their parties to cleave to just one line, Labour’s “broad church” must sound like hell-on-earth. As a left-wing Labour Party activist – against whom the Rogernomics-supporting “Backbone Club” (of which Ron Bailey was the Auckland convenor) regularly hurled thunderbolts, I can certainly vouch for it being a very hard slog.

 

What I must also vouch for, however, is that even in a disastrous election year, like 1975, Labour’s “broad church” could still attract 39.6 percent of the popular vote.

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday 10 February 2017.

Employing Representatives: How Limiting MPs Pay Rises Increases The Democratic Deficit.

Representatives NOT Employees: The steady reduction in the status of our Members of Parliament: from democratically elected representatives to "our employees in Wellington" reflects New Zealanders increasing disengagement from the political process. Seriously, how much power do employees have in this country?

 

“WHAT HAPPENS NOW?” The newly elected Member for Manuwera, Phil Amos, still not quite believing that his days as a secondary-school teacher were over, had rung the Leader of the Opposition, Arnold Nordmeyer, for guidance.

 

“Well,” said Nordy, “we’ll probably have a Caucus meeting sometime in February. [The conversation was taking place in November.] And since the Nats don’t like to call the House together too early – far too many farmers in their Caucus, with far too much to do – things won’t get really busy around here until about the middle of the year.”

 

“What am I supposed to do until then?”, Phil responded plaintively.

 

The Labour Leader chuckled. “My advice, Phil, is to talk to as many people as possible, and just use the time to get to know your electorate.”

 

Phil Amos: MP for Manurewa 1963-1975

 

That’s the way it was for a brand new MP, in a brand new seat, back in 1963.

 

Fifty years ago New Zealanders held very different expectations of their Members of Parliament. Very few people in 1963 would have considered it either appropriate, or accurate, to refer to Members of Parliament as “our employees in Wellington”. Most voters understood that they had elected a representative: someone whose duty it was to reflect, protect and defend the interests of their electorate.

 

The idea that one’s MP is nothing more than a glorified civil servant: a person expected to turn up for work every day, do their “job”, and collect their (excessive) pay, is a much more recent notion.

 

In 1963, Parliament was still a deeply respected institution: a place through which awestruck school-children were led by school-teachers and guides who informed them, solemnly, that this was where the country’s laws were made.

 

Democracy, itself, was still a highly-valued and hard-won achievement in 1963. Hardly surprising when, just twenty years earlier, a significant number of MPs, Phil Amos among them, had been fighting in North Africa, Italy and throughout the Pacific for its survival.

 

Perhaps that explains why communities informed, in 1963, that their Member of Parliament was coming for a visit felt both pleased and honoured.

 

How was that respect so comprehensively forfeited?

 

Partly, it was the work of the Baby-Boom Generation. Shaped by decades of post-war affluence and the dramatic technological innovations that had fuelled it, the Baby-Boomers  aggressively challenged the conservative moral and political assumptions of their parent’s and grandparents’ generations. Artists, movie directors, television producers and songwriters grew increasingly impatient with yesterday’s values: the times they were a changing.

 

And those changing times were stoking the fears of bankers and businessmen, who were rapidly coming round to the view that democracy was getting out of hand. Politicians were responding to the demands of workers, women, blacks and gays in ways that threatened capitalism’s long-term profitability.

 

Their solution, which in New Zealand went by the name of Rogernomics, was to take as many of the important economic decisions as possible out of politicians’ hands and give them to bankers and businessmen. But, to make this solution work, it would be necessary to turn a whole generation of politicians into liars and cheats. Telling the voters that they were being stripped of the power that had made the post-war era such a levelling experience for the rich and the powerful was, obviously, out of the question. They would have to be tricked into giving it up.

 

The people who copped the blame were, of course, the politicians. Many of these were guilty-as-charged – but some were not. It was important, therefore, to foster the notion that politics was an entirely disreputable profession, to which only entirely disreputable people were attracted. Populist media personalities insisted that, because no politician could be trusted, it was necessary for them and their readers/listeners/viewers to keep politicians on the shortest possible leash.

 

Members of Parliament were, accordingly, re-branded as the voters’ “employees”. Every aspect of their lives was subjected to the closest media scrutiny, and any failings ruthlessly exposed. Inevitably, as the public was increasingly persuaded that all politics are “dirty politics”, politicians felt obliged to surrender what remained of their ancient rights and privileges as political representatives, and to embrace, instead, the democratically empty role of political employee.

 

Many will cheer the Prime Minister’s decision to align their “employees’” pay rises with their own. Fewer will ask whose interests Mr Key is representing.

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 6 March 2015.