The Liberal Agenda – “Last Man Standing”: A false account of the Alliance split over going to war in Afghanistan

I would like to detail the experience I had working with a government cabinet minister Matt Robson in 2001 when the Alliance Party developed a dispute over whether to send troops to Afghanistan. I feel I have been forced to do this account because Matt Robson has produced a biographic film record of the Alliance leader and Deputy Prime Minister from that time, Jim Anderton, called “Last Man Standing”. This film record is false and misleading.

On September 11, 2001, the Afghan-based terror group associated with al-Qaeda attacked the Twin Towers in New York. At that time, I was working for Matt Robson as an Alliance Party member in his office when he was Associate Minister of Foreign Affairs, Minister of Immigration, Associate Minister of Justice and Disarmament Minister.

We were watching TV news late that night when the Twin Towers was attacked and the planes hitting the towers. Matt immediately remembered the comments in December 1963, by Malcolm X on the assassination of President Kennedy. Malcolm X used the phrase “the chickens coming home to roost” to describe the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. He meant that a violent national climate of racial hatred and foreign intervention eventually rebounded to produce domestic violence, stating that an “old farm boy” like him was never made sad by chickens returning to their own barnyard. He was immediately subject to strong attack for his comments including from the capitalist establishment as well as the leader of the Nation of Islam which he was a significant national spokesperson.

Matt Robson had a speech scheduled for an Alliance Party event at Otago University that week. The night before the speech we sat up virtually all night preparing a very strong antiwar response. He wrote a very strong speech against military intervention as a solution to the problem displayed by this terror attack. I have a particular memory of a line which Matt Robson used, which was: “We will not be able to achieve freedom by bombing the rubble of Afghanistan”

A speech along those lines was delivered at Otago University. Before we left for that meeting, Laila Harré, an Alliance Party MP and Cabinet Minister, came to speak to Matt and encouraged him to share the content of his speech, or the themes of his speech, with Jim Anderton, the then leader of the Alliance Party, and to get his clearance for delivering the anti-war position that Matt Robson wanted to deliver.

He did not seek that clearance, but when he made the speech at Otago University, it caused headlines across the country because of its strong anti-war, anti-intervention message. When we came back to Wellington, Matt Robson was summoned to Jim Anderton’s office and was kept there essentially for several hours. At the end of it, Matt had changed his position to one not opposing intervention and war in Afghanistan. At the Alliance caucus this position was supported by 8 MPs to 4.

On October 3, 2001, the Alliance supported a motion in Parliament, presented by Prime Minister Helen Clark, to endorse the government’s decision to send SAS troops to Afghanistan and to “totally” support “the approach taken by the United States of America.”

This followed a majority vote in Caucus binding all Alliance MPs. It is my understanding that Laila Harré had been assured before the caucus vote that the “agree to disagree” provisions of the Coalition agreement could have been invoked. However, by this stage Jim Anderton had promised (as Acting Prime Minister at the time of the attack on the twin towers) that New Zealand would back the US.  

I have no idea what threats or pressure were used on Matt Robson to achieve his support for the invasion in the Alliance caucus. However, once it became clear that he had shifted course, I said that I would not be able to continue to work in his office and gave two weeks’ notice of my resignation. I did not do a public resignation criticising Matt Robson’s decision. I did not want to turn this into a public scrap between me and Matt because I had had for some years, had a very good political, intellectual and personal relationship with him. And alongside working long hours, which was to be expected, we would often talk late into the night and share ideas. He had always been very, very generous with me in his time and even in our shared premises, he gave me the biggest room in the House reserved for Cabinet Ministers while we were in Wellington each week. I would have to travel with him up and down the country as his  support person with my own home in Auckland. And as I understood it, he pushed back in favour of hiring me to work in his office when there had been some reluctance from Jim Anderton to employ me to replace an Alliance Party staff member who had left his office.

I was faced with a problem because the Alliance Party had, through me, organised to sponsor a tour of John Pilger, the Australian documentary filmmaker and historian, who was well-known for his anti-war, anti-imperialist and pro-Palestine views. He was also great at deconstructing the racist, colonial-settler policies of the Australian state. He had agreed to do a speaking tour under the auspices of the Alliance.

But given the stance of the majority of the Alliance Party MPs to support sending troops to Afghanistan, it was necessary for me to cancel that tour, or try to reschedule it under a different sponsor. I had no choice, but the fact that I sent a fax ffrom Matt Robson’s office telling John Pilger what had happened was used to launch a public attack on me by Matt Robson in November following the national conference.

The majority of party members, most of the National Council of the Alliance, and some Alliance MPs (including cabinet minister, Laila Harré) supported an antiwar position. The party president Matt McCarten and the party national secretary Gerard Hehir supported that position also.

Because of that reality Jim Anderton tried to organise a coup against the party majority by seizing the computers and other equipment in the Alliance Party offices. Anderton used security to try and eject Gerard Hehir and other staff who supported the antiwar majority view from their offices.

Gerard Hehir and many staff then relocated their computers and Alliance Party membership data outside the parliamentary offices. But Jim Anderson demanded that he have access to all emails of staff to expose what they viewed as an attempt to overthrow the only legitimate leadership possible in the Alliance (his own).

A receipt for the fax I had sent John Pilger had been printed. This took the form of copying the top page only of the fax. Thanks to my SIS file, I received in 2023, I have a copy of the Dominion article from December 28, 2001, headed “Robson accused of Abuse over threat over fax”. Note the SIS was still spying on me even though I was working for a member of the New Zealand government.

By now I and others were getting pretty annoyed over what seemed to be bullying behaviour. Robson demanded the second page of the fax and said he would call Ministerial Service if I didn’t hand it over. It says I refused but I doubt I even had page two.

The Dominion reports: “The threat was made on the same day that security guards locked Alliance staff members out of their parliamentary offices, allegedly to check their computers for emails undermining leader Jim Anderton. 

According to the Dominion:

“In that fax, shortly before the aggressive debate on the war in Afghanistan at the party conference, Mr Treen said: ‘It would be absurd for you to tour under the auspices of the Alliance.’

“At the end of the first page of the fax, Mr Treen writes: ‘Regardless of the result the Alliance left will be taking steps to organise itself systematically after the conference in the knowledge of who is on which side being made clear. We have no desire to hand the party over….”

“The second page of the fax, sought by Mr Robson, and obtained by the Dominion continues “…to those who wish to subvert the purpose for which it was built – to advance a consistent left agenda in the political arena.”

The film’s narrative is that the emails and other actions were proof that a faction led by Matt McCarten driven only by an egotistical desire to bring down the government, led to the split and the demise of the Alliance Party.  The actual truth was Anderton demanded that it was his way without the possibility of compromise. He destroyed the Alliance rather than allow a democratic process, even a compromise that kept the two sides together in some way.

Matt Robson was charged with doing the review by Jim Anderton. He produced a report that I knew he could not really believe. This included the opportunist claim that women’s rights would be protected by an invasion.

Military intervention lasted 20 years. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed or wounded. Millions became refugees. The Taliban ultimately returned to power.

The problem with all interventions by empire, is that no matter what the declared goals are, their actual purpose is to extract wealth and exploit labour. Allies are formed within the nations targeted with classes and elites that are willing to sell their nation to the highest bidder. Any opposition is crushed. Nationalist responses are inevitable.

In December 2001 I wrote an open letter to the Labour Party conference largely predicting the horrific outcome of being involved in this war.

Some attachments that may be of interest:

A useful report on the Alliance Party conference from the Australian Greenleft at the time

NEW ZEALAND: Alliance torn apart by Afghan war by Sue Bolton

Film review: The new Jim Anderton doco loves him too much to make him interesting

New Zealand should never have joined the war in Afghanistan, by Keith Locke

Imperial Nostalgia: Afghanistan After Five Years of Taliban Rule, by Binoy Kampmark

Afghans “Have Been the Victims” of U.S. Military, Taliban, Cartels & More for Decades: Nagieb Khaja 

While urban areas benefited from U.S. occupation during the war, “Western forces allied themselves with forces that in rural Afghanistan were considered worse than the Taliban,” says Khaja. “The police forces and the warlords that were fighting side by side with American, Danish and British forces, they were drug cartels, they were ruthless criminals, they were rapists.”