Quoting Matt McCarten last Friday, Chris Trotter posits that “we should have stayed” in the Labour Party in 1989, after neo-liberal policies swept through the party like a coronavirus. This is all very well to say, but I think Matt/Chris might by now have forgotten what it was like then.
I was on the National Executive at the time of the split. Prime Minister Lange used to appear at the Council seemingly utterly defeated, with virtually every single one of Labour’s policies having been bowled over by neo-liberal reform. He would not/ could not answer any policy questions. It was pitiful to watch him. The tension at every meeting was palpable.
At national conferences, especially the famous one where Anderton stood for the presidency and narrowly lost (I can’t remember now if it was 88 or 89), people huddled in corners, in breakout rooms or wherever they could find, in small groups, plotting and planning. Good people screamed at each other. Do you remember the version of the ‘Red Flag’ that we lefties sung (I am sure it was penned by lovely Dion Martin), so sarcastic of the new Labour elite:
The cloth cap and the working class
As images are dated
For we are Labour’s Avant Garde
And we are educated
By tax reductions we have planned
To institute the promised land
And just to show we’re still sincere
We’ll sing the Red Flag once a year.
In our defence, we were young! The scenes around that time were both exciting and also disturbing. I think the scars of the time have largely healed now, but perhaps not completely.
But I want to know how we could have stayed. What would the plan have been? Labour was deeply unpopular coming up to the 1990 election – would we have used that electoral rout to try and change the direction of the party? But those left in caucus after the 1990 election were all neo-liberal central, weren’t they? What purchase could we have made?
Also, who would have done the work of the Alliance, including forcing change towards MMP (a movement led significantly by Rod Donald and the Alliance) producing an enduring alternative on the left (whatever you think of the Greens’ stewardship of that role) and keeping alive leftist policies, especially by always opposing neo-liberalism?
Even by 1999, when the Labour Party finally got into power again, it had barely added a human face to its neoliberal orthodoxy. In many ways it was deeply conservative. Were we expected to stay there, as an unwanted rump on the left, spouting the same old things and getting the same old response? Excuse my language, but bugger that!
Without NewLabour I think many of us would have eventually just walked away from politics. I don’t think Jim Anderton had a chance of turning that caucus around from within. They just hated him (do you remember the old annex where they put him, far, far, away from the centres of power?).
So just sayin’, Chris and Matt, that I still don’t see a viable pathway we could have gone down by staying in Labour then. But that does not mean we should not engage now, all those years later.
I have been very impressed with Labour’s reaction to the pandemic, and of the need to ‘spend’ their way out of it. I only wish that some of that spending had been used to raise incomes before an economic support package was so desperately needed. What if benefits and wages had been boosted while there was still a booming tax base to pay for it?
I think there is the political will for change within that caucus. There are certainly some good people who want change: Ardern, Little, Woods, even Robertson. There is massive amounts of work going on in the government and public sector to support change and has been for some time.
The only question left is whether Labour can both design the pathways and have the courage of their convictions to implement them. They need to look to their past, to other countries and to innovative opportunities for change. That is what this election will be about.
Dr Liz Gordon is a researcher and a barrister, with interests in destroying neo-liberalism in all its forms and moving towards a socially just society. She usually blogs on justice, social welfare and education topics.
Reflection and a few decades passing do prompt “shoulda-woulda-coulda…” thoughts. But no, it was untenable for the “Labour left” to stay.
The NZ Labour Party was and remains, largely an electoral machine that fires up three yearly, run in between by Wellington committees and executives. The fact Labour was not run by working class members beyond branch raffles etc. enabled the monetarist hijacking of the party in 1984, assisted of course by some sell out Union Secretaries at the time. It will astound some younger ones that there used to be a “Joint Council of Labour” where the NZFOL met directly with the Labour Party over workers issues. Douglas promptly stopped that!
A number of the Rogernomes were pure filth-as evidenced by their defection to their true home-ACT. The treatment of people like Sonya Davies by Douglas and his goons was appalling and not forgotten.
Another question perhaps is whether the Marxist left (never welcome in old Labour) should have departed New Labour so soon? I would say yes it did.
Good to read your inside perspective from the time Liz
D J S
We should have stayed to fight. After the first bubble to create new chances for the Left BURST, we had condemned A/NZ to a decade of Gnats, no real fight from Labour to diminish their ascendancy.
Your list of present Labour MPs exposes a delusional faith in a new version of neo-liberalism. We replaced Andrew Little with Jacinda, what sort of victory? We’ve emerged from lockdown because govt took the advice of the right scientists and we attribute that success to Jacinda. What is the evidence she will end poverty? I can’t credit your claim that she has left neo-liberalism behind when her closest allies in her team are Robertson and Twyford, breathing down her neck!
One new step angers me. We’re shutting out Cook Islanders when they had no virus at all. They’re also lacking $$. We welcome some risky Aussies who have plenty $$$. How cynical is your policy St. Jacinda?
Liz;
thanks for that historic depiction as our family missed that time when we fled from the chaos that NZ had become in 1967 in NZ so we settled in Canada during 1988 to 1998 and what a sad story you eloquently told that made us understand the decision you wisely made.
Looking At the labour party today I do see a deeply rooted neo-liberal tinge still there that we need to rout.
Jacinda needs our combined help to rid the last vestiges of neo-liberalism.
Jacinda I would like to suggest and her advisers are all part of the problem.
‘i got into politics because of child poverty’
on election to the leadership and becoming the PM
‘we will halve child poverty in 10 years’
My God not her child who will never ever ever be in poverty.
Gutless!
There is a plausible counterfactual history, Liz, that has the Labour Party emerging from the 1980s in one piece. In this alternative universe, however, there is no Jim Anderton. Instead, Labour is led by a more adroit, if somewhat less charismatic, president whose priority, once he realised the degree of treachery being planned by Douglas and his cronies, was to allow the party to protect David Lange.
A David Lange who was able to trust Labour’s president and who looked upon the party as his ally, rather than his enemy, may well have been able to steer New Zealand down the more measured and moderate path of reform followed by Bob Hawke and Paul Keating.
Yes, neoliberalism would have entered New Zealand, nothing short of a full-blown socialist revolution could have stopped it, but it would have been a much less virulent strain.
Not as heroic a story as the one which played out in this universe, Liz. But, then, the Left has always had all the best stories – and bugger-all of the power.
Only very rarely is the world lucky enough to get both.
If no one has said anything yet there should be some sort of Politzer Prize for bloggers so we can enter this comment it’s that good, and everyone bloody well knows it.
I recently met the guy who took that photograph…
” I think the scars of the time have largely healed now, but perhaps not completely.”
Are you kidding me Dr LG? After all that’s been written here by many people?
Our once was wonderful AO/NZ’s a fucking train wreck. We have some of the worst social dysfunctions stats in the fucking world!
Neoliberalism, as it was in AO/NZ, wasn’t a political ideal that went wobbly in the knees for being overloaded by good intentions. [It] was a swindle. It was crooks being crooked. That, is all it was.
Let me draw on an analogy…
Say I’m a burglar. What do I do? I burgle, right? How do I burgle?
Well, firstly, I case a likely looking joint so I might make an excuse to jump the fence then slither around my target house while peering in the windows to see if there’s any swag I can grab. And if there is swag, how easy is it to get?
No alarms, sketchy old window catches, key under the door mat, lost of trees to hide behind, no one home…so in I go.
I make billions. Billions and billions. Now. Here’s the kicker as the yanks like to say.
I was previously broke-as right? Suddenly, I have billions. And because of that, many people are asking… ” Hand on a minute Mate. You were broke in 1980? Now you have billions of dollars and you live in a $50 million dollar NYC pad? How come then?
Indeed. How come?
I might be stretching things out just a bit when I say that AO/NZ COULD have been one of the wealthiest countries in the world given the size of our place with a scant few million and a wide open export market to some of the most enthusiastic consumers in the world for our products and not for plastic crap or i-tech mind melting junk or tie died sarongs. Nope. We had foods and wool and lots and lots of it.
In Invercargill, at this very moment, there are enormous brick wool stores packed to the roof with thousands of bales of wool. The farmers got their pathetic $2.00 a kg for it. They’re done and gone. All paid for. Be quiet. Move along.
So? Who owns it now and why is it there and when it ships, where will it be shipped to?
I can tell you. It’ll go to China and be made into the likes of Icebreaker and you’ll pay many $100’s for a few grams in a garment and it’ll be so chemically treated it’ll feel like cold, clammy shit to wear. You see what I mean?
So? How do the crooks who used the greedy, selfish concept of neoliberalism explain where our export contacts went and why we now have a crippled economy where there was clearly great wealth per head of pop’ and one or two rich-as Scunthorpes.
The answer is they don’t. They’ll keep their yaps shut and hide our money and hope to the dear sweet baby Jesus that it all just blows over until they croak of natural causes because they’d a never seen the internet coming.
Having said that, they’ll be using the internet to their advantage when they can. Like they used our MSM. Remember the old school RNZ? TVNZ? The Listener? Our news papers? All gone now.
Kiwi Neoliberalism was no “Whoops! Oopsie! Sorry. Seemed like a good idea at the time.” It was a basic swindle 101.
And there’s no one out there that I know of other than myself that’s fighting the good fight.
They’ve got our stuff and things and money. All they have to do now is not get sprung so they must not start throwing money around because there’s not meant to be any.
( Ooo!? A little red dot…? Watch a Lightbox series called ‘Future Man’. Is very crude and very funny and watch for that little red dot.)
Wool farmers? Hello? Hello? Are you out there…? Hello? You’ve been fucked without the kissing. Hello?
Brilliant Countryboy, especially
” I think the scars of the time have largely healed now, but perhaps not completely.”
Are you kidding me Dr LG?”
“You’ve been fucked without the kissing. Hello?”
There is so much irony of the woke middle-class in NZ who blog about the poor, and colonise their experiences for them which bizarrely now has morphed into hating their own identity, and blogging frantically against it.
I kind of feel it is like the cultural revolution where the kids were encouraged to denounce their parents, neighbours, community.
There is a certain fucked up snobbery in sneering at for example a Air NZ hostess who is now made redundant who needs to go on welfare that most people would feel sympathy for but the woke don’t and turn it into they need to give the money to xyz they promote…. It’s in / out division.
Or a neoliberals claiming to be the poor’s voice (aka ex banker aka Shamubeel Eaqub types)…
So yep, don’t think the farmers or the NZ economy is going to be saved anytime soon, in fact the opposite is happening the left are obsessed with blaming the groups who provide the food, while thinking it is xenophobic not to give our water to well educated, wealthy, overseas, profiteers…
If by chance a lefty comes into contact with the poor and lower class they claim to represent, they are outraged by their racist and xenophobic blue collar stances and have to retreat back into the $100k+ territory of predatory woke social commentators and committee advisory groups…
Same happened to Labour in the UK and Democrats in US, they just don’t like or have anything in common anymore with the poorer, uneducated classes they helped create, who get their pronouns wrong and don’t know Trans is the new improved Feminism and a group of white men are one step away from the KKK.
The question here is whether there is a way back. I always love your great writing Countryboy. Maybe I am wrong to think there is a glimmer of hope (perhaps the glint in that hidden gold mine, wrongfully acquired from the people). It’s f***ing depressing, isn’t it.
This is a song about NZs hunting for gold sung by the composer Paul Metsers. We should all appreciate and know it, it is beautiful and as he sings, it is no use just sitting; we need to be working like those miners and we are sure to do better than they did. Our future is not as hard to find if we get our backs into it and stop relying on the gold that others bring here.
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lswLTVtqzW8
Another thoughtful piece going back a century or so. But what is a century in human affairs when we actually run our lives like forgetful mice on a mousewheel! Thinking is required for remembering, something that is not taught in the ‘best’ schools.
English Folk Verse (c.1870)
The Fifth of November
Remember, remember!
The fifth of November,
The Gunpowder treason and plot;
I know of no reason
Why the Gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot!
Guy Fawkes and his companions
Did the scheme contrive,
To blow the King and Parliament
All up alive.
Threescore barrels, laid below,
To prove old England’s overthrow.
But, by God’s providence, him they catch,
With a dark lantern, lighting a match!
A stick and a stake
For King James’s sake!
If you won’t give me one,
I’ll take two,
The better for me,
And the worse for you.
A rope, a rope, to hang the Pope,
A penn’orth of cheese to choke him,
A pint of beer to wash it down,
And a jolly good fire to burn him.
Holloa, boys! holloa, boys! make the bells ring!
Holloa, boys! holloa boys! God save the King!
Hip, hip, hooor-r-r-ray!
http://www.potw.org/archive/potw405.html
Many good people are leaving this country (just like those that left the Labour Party in 1984 and for the same reasons) and have been for 30 years and now our population growth and social services are being preyed upon by the cheapest body neoliberalism.
Funny enough, some of the lefties seem all for it and continue the trend with their writing, seemingly not able to tell fact from fiction anymore.
The love of migrant low wage or income less workers who apparently in woke/neoliberal eyes all hardworking, exploited but indispensable souls here…. gosh, sounds suspiciously like the myth of Maori as humble savage in the 1900’s …..
Truth is, stereotypes are used as social fabric to create power relationships…. Lefties are helping their Rogernomics nemesis’s daily… just like in 1984 by fighting the easy fight.
Really who are all these people, where do they go, some other place probably much worse than Aoteroa!
We live in the land of milk and honey (well some of us still do) I wouldn’t live anywhere else!
BUT
I will fight to the end to get a fairer society.
Talk to the Minister of Immigration who allows all these people to come in because farmers need farm managers because Kiwis aren’t prepared to work ridiculous hours for that magical $45,000 a year, Gasp! with a free house and some free milk or meat or both.
The government allows this shit no one else. They do the same in the fast food industry, in construction and other trades, they have these poor bastards live in 6 to a room situations. Bonded to these shits that got them here.
Its called ‘growth by immigration’ and capitalism requires growth at any price!
@Michal
New Zealand brain-drain worst in world
New Zealand has the worst record among the developed nations for retaining its skilled workers, with nearly a quarter of them having left the country, a World Bank study has revealed.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/expat/expatnews/7973220/New-Zealand-brain-drain-worst-in-world.html
Keep replacing the bright with chefs and labourers, Michel and NZ now has some of the worst downward statistics in the world for social outcomes… we are dropping in world rankings with our approaches to knowledge and skills and our ability to retain them here…
‘There are certainly some good people who want change: Ardern, Little, Woods, even Robertson’.
Who, what, where? I don’t know them and can’t comment on whether they are good people or not.
By their actions I see them nurturing the same neo-liberal ‘orthodoxy’ they were weaned on.
I don’t see anything progressive in any of them.
Liz wrote: “would we have used that electoral rout to try and change the direction of the party?”
Yes. By rolling the neoliberals’ support base in the electorate branches from within the party. There were also a number of centrist allies in that Labour caucus. Not the least of who was Helen Clark.
Chris and Matt’s point is that had the NewLabour schism not occurred and had the Left stuck it out and done the hard yards of organising within the party at the electorate organisation level, then the Labour Party caucus today would be able to think outside of the neoliberal economic doctrine box it is in.
Nothing can be done about what happened in the past. But things can be done in the future. A number of those once youthful comrades from back in the 80s and 90s understood this prior to the last election and rejoined the Labour Party and started doing the hard yards. It’s all hard yards in the Labour Party for the blue collar working class. Back then, now today, and tomorrow too.
Should we have stayed Liz YES !! it was our party with a proud tradition formed in the first place to be a voice for the oppressed and as a handbrake against the worst excesses of capitalism.
I remember when Jim left and the upheavals of the fight that was viscous , i was 20 at the time and it was a continuation of the upheaval that had begun in 1984 with the ” supposed debt and currency Armageddon we were sold and Muldoon who was far from perfect was the convenient scapegoat.
The fact that this revolution was led and advanced by people who had signed up to advance the principles of the labour movement and then went about destroying everything that the party was committed to defending was designed to destroy the labour movement from within to ensure the destruction of any opposition to the rich man’s capitalist revolution and what better vehicle to usher in these reforms masked as a response to a ” crisis ” as reform that only a Labour party could deliver !!!
The irony of that still rankles all these years later.
What if we and the govt realised that the government doesn’t operate the same way as a household and thus doesn’t need to raise money to spend it? That they can, as a matter of fact, create money as they need it and don’t need to borrow it?
That when it comes to the nation’s finances and its economy the government is the prime mover.
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