Island Life by David Slack

Inside every chubby Londoner there may well be a svelte and stylishly-dressed Parisian wanting to get out, but I have my doubts. You walk down the boulevard to Gare du Nord, you pick up your Eurostar tickets, and a couple of hours or so later you're in another world. They're stylish people, the French, and wherever you go next, the locals are going to suffer by comparison. We have been here for the weekend to see friends, family and war correspondents. I should apologise now to one or two people reading this who I didn't get a chance to call. We should have allowed more time. It's been nice here, but we're all pining for more French food, French style, French weather and another apartment as nice as the one we left behind. Tomorrow morning we will be back under the channel, picking up a car in Paris and heading south.

You go into a holiday with certain assumptions and they are inevitably awry. We thought it would be hard to persuade Mary-Margaret to endure long hours in museums or art galleries, but she has been enthusiastic. This should not be read as smug gloating. We have our moments over TV, food and choices of destinations, but it has been possible to do many of the things we had imagined might not be viable and that's been a pleasant surprise.

Inside every block of marble is a work of art just waiting for the right movement of hand and tool. We think it may be a bit like the Weetbix boxes Mary-Margaret and her friends have been lately raiding for All Black cards. I see one enthusiastic collector back home was so eager to find out what was inside he opened up a dozen boxes right there in Pak'n'Save. Another Tana. Another Tana. Another Tana. If we saw one marble statue of Diana and her dog, we saw a hundred. You chip away, you reveal the creation within. Another Diana and a dog. Another Diana and a dog.The Kiss? No just another Diana. That Rodin got lucky though; every piece a surprise. I have perhaps a hundred photos of The Kiss, if you would like one.

Photos, we have gigabytes of them. There are a few here, if you're interested. The lady with the cat said, as she watched the Tartan Army spend their four days in Paris drinking their way to the Scotland versus France qualifier for the 2008 European championship: how can they come all this way and just drink all day? We are mostly drinking a little in the evening. Also occasionally at lunch. You can feel inordinately content with the world after a couple of glasses of wine in a smoke-filled café. A good-looking young waiter comes to the table and charms our daughter, and we tell her she should consider marrying a Frenchman one day. On sober reflection, you wonder if fecklessness and infidelity is something you should wish upon her in her adult life.

She is learning about life on the streets of France and also in its apartments. In Montmartre there was a box collection of Audrey Hepburn movies. She embraced them all, interspersed with many screenings of Zathura and the execrable Mary-Kate and The Other One in Paris. She is entranced by Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Her father is entranced by the reader of the evening news on 3, whose name is also Audrey. She has a singular talent for delivering news in the manner of a stylish waiter, that is to say: with a smile and good wishes, rather than following the pantomime cues suggested by the gravity or pathos (or absence thereof ) of the story. She is also, it has to be said, attractive. A friend tells me from home that broadcasting is still in some flux and that perhaps the solution would be to bring back Judy. I recommend Audrey.

Meanwhile, on the streets, life has its dismal dimensions. The hand goes out for money, sometimes with skill, sometimes with dejected resignation. The buskers on the Metro, of course, are not panhandling. They deserve, and probably earn, plenty from the violins and accordions that fill the carriages with music. You may recall a scene in Amelie where the panhandler tells her not to put money in his cup because it’s Sunday and he’s not working. There was a guy on our street who sat in the same sunny spot each day, Monday to Friday, with his little dog. His clothes were a little shabby, but by any measure of living rough, he was a yuppie. His face had a measure of mystery and a hint of the malign in it, but he was essentially cheery, and doing well. We were also accosted in les Halles by Romanians purporting to be mute and deaf and raising money for their school. I found a couple of coins, Karren chided me for falling for something so obvious. She was right. We saw them a few minutes later gathered and arguing amongst themselves with some vigour, untroubled by neither hearing nor speech difficulties. For truly bleak spectacles, though, down and out in London still makes the bleakest picture: grimy, desolate, resigned, hopeless. As I write this, the BBC is describing the first run on a bank in the UK (mortgages from Northern Rock to six times the value of your income) since the 19th century. You should see the cranes on the UK skyline. Time to get back on the train.

Where can a person go when all the world cup shouting grows too loud? You might consider Paris. We have been here since Saturday and have encountered it only un peu. If they learn that we are New Zealanders, people seize it as a conversation point, but the nation is, as you probably would imagine, not gripped. Yesterday we happened to be in the neighbourhood of the Hotel de Ville, so we dropped in to the Rugby World Cup exhibition which opened that morning. It was imaginatively conceived. Astroturfed rooms are decorated floor to ceiling with glossy pictures of the game and quotations of French writers and thinkers who have turned their minds to the deeper meaning of the scrum, lineout, and forward pack. There are recurring references to the turtle formation of the Roman Centurions. The exhibition steps you through match-day, hour by hour, from the liniment of spartan changing rooms to the after-match drinks.

Star attraction is a giant-screen All Black haka led by Carlos Spencer. Everyone stops to look, and by everyone I mean the two or three dozen people who were there. Quite a few chaps in blue blazers, not so many chic Parisiens. Perhaps the crowds will grow; the exhibition got a fairly gratuitous plug on the evening news. They also covered a reunion of captains of the French team: many cauliflower ears and heavy necks too large to bear a stiff collar and tie.

Outside, it’s Paris. We are in Montmartre in an apartment three floors up old wooden stairs with a wrought-iron balustrade. We are having the time of our lives. Karren lived here for two years and I have been promising we would come and holiday here for a long time now. We will be in Paris for two weeks and then going south, ending up near Toulouse. We’ll be home for Christmas.

Mary-Margaret is taking home schooling from Mum and Dad to maintain her maths, reading and writing; but her real learning is happening outside the apartment. We came home from the Picasso museum and she lay down on the floor and began sketching. She can grow tired from walking her little legs around the city, but she’s drinking it all in.

Karren’s French is very good; mine is sufficient to make my needs known. My phone battery est mort. What deals do you offer for internet mobile? Comprehending rapid speech is still generally beyond my capability. In a butcher shop yesterday, a woman asked if that bottle of wine was all I was buying. Non, I replied, failing to grasp her meaning, but responding in a way that seemed appropriate to the tone. It gradually dawned on me as the butcher carefully sliced, pared and minced, that she had meant: I’ll be a while. My pride was the butcher’s gain. I improvised something else to buy. Merci, au revoir.

Here's the promised second excerpt from Chris Trotter's new book No Left Turn, published by Random House and reprinted with their kind permission. This comes from Chapter Ten, Stronger Seas.

The December 17 package signalled a renewed offensive against the welfare state and the full-employment economy. The ideological impetus, as with the reforms of the previous three years, came from Treasury and was set out in Government Management - two weighty volumes of advice it released following the election. The strategy was simple: reduce the rate of income tax and with it the volume of state revenue; alarm the country with the inevitable expansion of the government's deficit; and then prepare the nation for a move against organised labour as the only means of turning around the massive rise in unemployment that would inevitably follow.

Sharp-eyed readers will already have spotted in the December 17 package a précis of the subsequent economic 'packages' adopted and introduced by successive governments - both Labour and National - over the course of the following 20 years. The massive shift in the tax burden from the rich to the poor was signalled, along with the cuts in welfare provision and the productivity-boosting reductions in wage-levels which followed the decisive defeat of the trade union movement.

The Treasury programme was now largely impervious to democratic checks and balances - provided always that no mechanism was devised to transmit the true level of popular opposition into the sacrosanct precincts of Parliament. Fortunately, at least from Treasury's perspective, New Zealand's lack of a written constitution, its unicameral Parliament and its distorting FPP electoral system all conspired to make such an intrusion extremely unlikely. Once a party was elected to power there were virtually no effective legal means of restraining it. And with both of the major parties selecting their policies from the same Treasury hymnal (and with FPP making any more than two large parliamentary parties exceedingly difficult to arrange) these bureaucratic guardians of the new orthodoxy were quietly confident that no dissenting melody could intrude upon New Zealand capitalism's revised choral repertoire. Unless, that is, the dissident song was sung by someone already in the chapel - like the prime minister.

Over the summer parliamentary recess, David Lange and Margaret Pope developed a detailed critique of the December 17 package and, on 22 January, with Douglas out of the country, Lange struck back. In a direct appeal to the public and over the heads of his own cabinet colleagues, he cancelled the fl at tax proposal.

This removed a key element from Douglas' strategy. Without a sudden and substantial fall in government revenue none of the other mechanisms could operate with anything like the same effectiveness. Douglas and State-Owned Enterprises Minister Richard Prebble had always relied on the destabilising impact of Treasury's laboriously prepared, comprehensive and readily implemented policy prescriptions. In this respect, the timing of the stockmarket crash and the hastily assembled character of the December 17 package proved to be fatal vulnerabilities. They had given the prime minister and his speechwriter a chance to organise a devastating counter-attack.

At this point, Lange could have reached out and joined hands with the large and well-organised left-wing of his party. He would have been able to count on several of his caucus colleagues to follow his lead, especially as the ruling bodies of the party (of which I was at that time a member) would certainly have made it clear that those who refused to back the prime minister would face de-selection. A cabinet revolt could have been forestalled by ruthless use of the prime-ministerial privilege to advise the Governor-General. The prospect of losing their warrants would have had a powerfully concentrating effect on the minds of all but the most fanatical of his ministerial enemies. Had Lange possessed the will and the skill, he could have mounted what in effect would have been a counter-coup against Treasury. But the man who had risen so effortlessly to the highest office in the land was not that sort of politician. He had courage, he had a conscience and he had Margaret Pope, but he did not have the ability to forge the political alliances that allow a politician to make more than a handful of grand gestures.

So he urged his cabinet colleagues to slow down the pace of change and 'pick up the casualties', and told the country it was time to pause 'for a cuppa'. But he had no coherent plan. Even so, his actions threw the parliamentary and organisational wings of the party into chaos. Rebellious noises from left-wing back-bench MPs (now including the revered Sonja Davies) were matched by openly mutinous noises from Lange's cabinet colleagues. A dressing of sorts was placed over these gaping wounds at a caucus retreat in Ashburton in February 1988, when an 'accord' promising greater consultation between cabinet and caucus was reluctantly conceded. By April, however, the tensions between Left and Right had again erupted into open conflict. Left-wing activists and trade unionists in Richard Prebble's Auckland Central electorate had been waging a two-year campaign to wrest control of the local party organisation from Prebble's henchmen. They were at the point of success when, in defiance of the national executive, the electorate committee chair ruled all but Prebble's followers ineligible to stand for election. What was to be done? The leader of the anti-Prebble group, Matt McCarten, at that time an up-and-coming Auckland trade unionist, recalled the debate in his memoir Rebel in the Ranks:

The reality is that Prebble and his key backers were senior ministers. Prebble told the Labour caucus that if the party backed our machine and dumped him it would be all over. The senior ministers apparently threatened the party. I had a meeting with Mark Gosche [Secretary of the Northern Service Workers' Union and McCarten's boss] who reported that he'd been told: 'Call your dogs off or the government is going to go after the union movement. We'll pass legislation against the unions, we've got the numbers at caucus, we're going to ram this through. We're going to do you.' . . . Apparently, 17 Labour MPs had signed a letter to David Lange saying that if Prebble went down, they would bring the government down and form a new party to stand against the Labour Party.

Shortly after this encounter, the party president, Rex Jones, flew to Auckland with the party's general secretary, Tony Timms, to bring McCarten and about eighty of his comrades up to speed with caucus developments. 'They've threatened,' said Jones. 'This could bring the government down.' McCarten's response was typically terse - and radical:

Hold on a minute. Two years ago I was told to go into Auckland Central and work with the locals to build the party and drive Prebble out. It seems obvious to me now that the right-wing MPs have put their hands up and threatened the party. So we should call a special conference of the Party and expel them. This government will likely fall but it's as good as gone anyway. The important thing is to preserve the Party. The Labour Party made a mistake selecting these people so sack them, throw them out and let them stand against us. They'll lose and the Labour Party can rebuild itself. Isn't that the obvious thing to do?

Jones's response from the top table was embarrassed laughter. 'You mad little fucker,' he muttered to McCarten.

But with characteristic acuity, McCarten had set forth the indisputable facts about the predicament the Labour Party now faced. The government was doomed. In the years ahead, the key battle would indeed be fought over how, and by whom, the party should be rebuilt. And if that process was to be successfully accomplished, the 'right-wing MPs' would have to be driven out.

But not yet. After much hand-wringing, Jones and Timms got their way and McCarten's 'machine' backed off. But, just in case the New Zealand Council of the party - dominated by the Left since the 1987 conference - attempted to relitigate the matter, Prebble placed each of its members under legal restraint. If the council moved against him, declared the Labour MP for Auckland Central, he would challenge his own party's constitution in court.

It was the beginning of a political war that would rage for more than a decade. This war may have lacked the dramatic spectacles of earlier struggles between Maori and Pakeha, workers and bosses, rednecks and protesters, Left and Right, and there were to be no columns of mounted specials trit-trotting through the streets of the capital, no rioters smashing up Queen Street, no police batonings. But it was no less a manifestation of the fundamental dichotomy that has riven this nation from the moment of its birth. The dichotomy which social historian Tony Simpson identified more than 30 years ago, between those who see New Zealand primarily as a good place to make money, and those who see it as a good place to live. That the struggle was located on the left of New Zealand politics, and that its principal antagonists were nearly all men

and women who, in 1988, were members of the Labour Party, emphasises how strongly the aspirations of the democratic and egalitarian majority provide the motive power for New Zealand history.

Treasury's subversion of the parliamentary wing of the Labour Party was the first - the indispensable - pre-condition for the success of its top-down revolution. Breaking Treasury's ideological overlordship and recovering the parliamentary Left's freedom of manoeuvre accordingly became the first - and equally indispensable - precondition for recommencing the nation's forward march.

In preparation for the looming struggle, the Labour Party divided itself into three quasi-formal factions. Jim Anderton moved swiftly to revamp the Economic Policy Network, a ginger group he had formed with Pat Kelly and Peter Harris (an economist with the PSA) at the time of the Great Economic Debate, into a more substantial vehicle for leftwing agitation called the Labour Policy Network (LPN). Prebble and his followers, seeing the urgent need to organise the party's right wing, launched the Backbone Club. The most powerful organisational force in the party, however, was the core group made up of office-holders on the national executive and the secretaries of the major affiliated unions, who were often the same people.

This latter group enjoyed the strong if highly circumspect support of Helen Clark, now a cabinet minister, and a number of key backbenchers. This gave it considerable support among Labour's regional structures, in the electorate committees and among the ordinary branch membership. Although by 1988 the consequences of Rogernomics had prompted thousands of party members to vote with their feet, the branches were still just able to outvote the trade union affi liates on the floor of the annual conference. The 'moderate centre', as its critics on the Left described the Clark-led group, also enjoyed the considerable support of the

CTU's national executive, the SUP - and, to Anderton and his followers' dismay, Pat Kelly. After being outmanoeuvred by Ken Douglas in his bid to secure the presidency of the new CTU, Rob Campbell had departed the trade union movement for a less stressful and more fi nancially rewarding career as an economic and business consultant. Kelly was the unions' acknowledged champion inside the Labour Party, although Campbell did retain his seat on Labour's national executive.

The long-term goal of the centrists was to steady the process of 'economic rationalisation', as the Australians called their version of Rogernomics, by bringing organised labour into the process as a disciplined and helpful economic and social partner. Their model, also Australian, was the detailed accord thrashed out between the Australian Council of Trade Unions and Bob Hawke's Labor opposition immediately prior to Hawke's election victory in early 1983. Campbell himself had argued for just such a social contract in After the Freeze, the 1983 book he wrote with the then FOL economist, Alf Kirk. Essentially a policy of limited accommodation with the Roger Douglas reforms, the proposed 'compact' demanded a 'constructive engagement' between the Labour government, the Labour Party and the CTU. Notwithstanding the spirit of concession and compromise in which it was promoted, the compact was still too radical a policy for the likes of Douglas and Prebble. The centrists and the Left, therefore, had a common cause in driving the Right's most hated leaders from cabinet. Whether they had anything else in common remained, for the time being, moot.

Throughout the remaining months of 1988, while the party and the unions swung in behind their leaders' attempts to slow the pace of change, Douglas and his followers in the Backbone Club manoeuvred frantically to depose the prime minister. Information was leaked

to the news media continuously. Strange, raucous characters whom no one had seen before turned up to party meetings and launched into well rehearsed and vitriolic attacks on the trade unions and their 'communist' friends. Prebble's own propaganda pitched the Left's 'forces of darkness' against the Right's 'forces of light'. It was a strange and bitter time to be a member of the Labour Party.

Then it got even worse. When Rex Jones announced he would not be seeking a second term as party president, Anderton declared himself a contender. The Left was enthusiastic and the LPN immediately began organising support. The centrists were aghast. They knew the caucus was, as Lange so succinctly put it, 'allergic' to the idea that Anderton should be in control of anything, let alone candidate re-selection. They were also angry because Anderton's candidacy confirmed every rumour the Backbone Club had spread: the Left was out to 'take over the party'; they were going to throw out every MP who resisted their 'communist' agenda. The centrists also suspected that an Anderton candidacy would make it next to impossible to sell the compact to the Left. And if, as many moderates now anticipated, they would be forced to solicit Backbone Club votes to keep Anderton out, a furious Left (nearly half the party membership) would cry betrayal and heap red-hot calumnies upon both their own heads and their 'collaborationist' agenda. So it proved. Anderton's principal rival in the contest was Ruth Dyson, a close ally of Helen Clark to whom, purely out of fear of Anderton, the Backbone Club had pledged its support. The Left's control of the affiliates' council and its support networks in the branches appeared to give it the numbers, but the vote would be close. The author remembers meeting Matt McCarten, Anderton's

numbers man, on the morning of the election in the dimly lit corridors of the Dunedin Town Hall. 'Well, Matt,' I asked nervously. 'What do you think? Will he win?' McCarten smiled ruefully. 'My heart says yes,' he replied quietly, 'but my calculator says no.' He was right. In the presidential ballot, outgoing president Rex Jones personally cast all 55 of the Engineers' Union's votes for Dyson. The fi nal result: Anderton, 473 votes; Dyson, 572.

Just before the ballot, Lange had addressed the conference:

When I opened the Economic Summit Conference (it seems like a lifetime ago) I talked about a country not too far from here. I talked about a country which was prosperous, which had no poor, which was tolerant and generous and fair. I talked about New Zealand and I meant every word. I mean it now. I would not be here if I did not believe it. I would not be here if I did not believe that New Zealand could be that country, and it will be.

But it was not. Outside the conference hall lay a country reeling from Labour's savage restructuring of its economy, the collapse of its stockmarket, the looming privatisation of its state-owned industries and the disappearance of so many of the familiar ideological landmarks that had given it direction for the past 50 years. The night before Lange spoke, hundreds had protested outside the very same town hall where young students had accosted Holyoake in 1971. But it wasn't a war they were protesting against. This time, the protest was against the fact that 170,000 of their fellow citizens were out of work, that their employers were refusing to offer them a wage increase and locking them out when they attempted to withdraw their labour. Ken Douglas, in offering the prospect of a compact to the conference - and the government - had said: 'Other forces control the levers of government and the levers of management. They are the real brokers of economic power.' He was appealing to the government as his predecessors in the 1930s had done, to intercede on behalf of working people against the managers. But the protesters looked at Prebble and Douglas, and they didn't see interceders. They saw traitors. 'People before Profits' declared one of the placards. To the once-loved Labour Party, another simply said: 'Give us back our future'.

For all this, the 1988 conference recorded some potentially influential achievements. The CTU did offer, and the party did accept, a more 'constructive engagement' between the government, the employers and the trade unions. A 'statement of intent' was issued, pledging both the organisational and parliamentary wings of the party to genuine consultation and to 'no surprises'. But these outcomes were much less appreciated than they would have been eighteen months earlier.

The ratification of a radically new

policy-making structure for the party also went largely unnoticed. As far back as 1978, Helen Clark had written:

A thorough party reorganisation which established a committed and working membership, involved in policy groups and a range of party educational activities, would be the prerequisite to the success of a triennial congress which came together to actually decide party policy for the next three years.

By virtue of her position on the party executive for the best part of a decade, Clark, with the help of Wilson and Dyson, had succeeded in having something very close to this 'Scandinavian' model ratified in Dunedin. Labour's rank-and-file members and politicians needed only one thing to make it work, but it was the one thing the 1988 conference had almost entirely destroyed - trust.

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Copyright Chris Trotter 2007

Chris Trotter and Random House have kindly given us permission to run two excerpts from No Left Turn, a splendid new book which the publishers accurately describe thus:

Not one to ever shirk a lively debate, Trotter rips through this country’s past like a Taranaki tornado, bowling over the elaborate facades of both the Right and the Left, and letting sunlight shine into the famous, infamous and murkier corners of our past.

It’s in your bookstore now, and this author highly recommends it for its engaging style, its fascinating tales, and its unimpeachable intellectual defensibility.

Today’s excerpt comes from Chapter 5: Jamming Uncle Scrim. Come back on Monday to find the Labour party in crisis, and for an elaboration of these passages, you can hear our interview with Chris Trotter on Public Address Radio tomorrow at 5.00 pm on Radio Live.

...With Massey’s death the political style of New Zealand conservatism changed dramatically. Driving that change was one of the most devious — and dangerous — political operatives this country has ever produced. Indeed, if one was asked to nominate a single individual to take the title ‘éminence grise of New Zealand politics’, it would be very hard to go past the figure of Albert Ernest Davy. The son of a Wellington policeman, Davy was the epitome of a right-wing activist. He began his career in the provinces as a small businessman, being variously a bootmaker, draper and hairdresser. Ambitious and highly competitive, he fed his passion for getting ahead by engaging (with considerable success) in competitive sport. Davy was also a bigot. Escaping the military call-up, he threw himself into the reactionary campaigns of the Gisborne branch of the PPA. In 1919 his innate political skills were put on public display for the first time when he organised W.D. Lysnar’s successful challenge to the Maori leader, and incumbent MP for Gisborne, Sir James Carroll.

Impressed, the Reform Party’s national secretary, E.A. James, took Davy under his wing and groomed him for a more important role in national affairs. In 1923 he was appointed a full-time organiser for the party, and prior to the 1925 election he spent several months in the United States studying the latest developments in electioneering techniques. He returned to New Zealand to find the right-wing political scene in turmoil. An attempt to bring about a ‘fusion’ of the two parties of the Right had run aground as a result of Sir Joseph Ward’s intransigence, and the belief of Reform’s new leader and prime minister, Gordon Coates, that the Liberal electoral threat was more apparent than real. Brimming over with confidence in the methods he had studied in the US, Davy convinced his party to put aside the amalgamation option for the duration, and allow him to run what would be, in effect, a ‘presidential’ campaign for its attractive new leader. He even had a slogan: ‘Coats off with Coates!’

In the course of his sojourn in the US Davy would have become familiar with the ideas of the celebrated political journalist Walter Lippmann. During World War I, Lippmann had served alongside Edward Bernays — founder of the ‘science’ of public relations — on the Committee on Public Information, the US’s wartime propaganda unit. Already hailed as America’s most respected political commentator, Lippmann welcomed the new science of public manipulation as a ‘revolution’ in the ‘practice of democracy’.

The ‘manufacture of consent’, declared Lippmann, must become a ‘self-conscious art and regular organ of popular government’. The whole process to be managed by a ‘specialised class’ dedicated to the ‘common interests’ of society, which ‘very largely elude public opinion entirely’. The ‘responsible men’ to whom the operations of society are entrusted, he concluded, must ‘live free of the trampling and the roar of the bewildered herd’. The crucial mission of public relations in liberal capitalist democracies was, therefore, to ensure that ‘the herd’ remained passive ‘spectators’ of the political process, and not active ‘participants’.

A contemporary of Lippmann’s, the philosopher John Dewey, cut through this elitist humbug with the pithy observation that modern politics was ‘the shadow cast upon society by big business’. According to Dewey, the key role of the new public relations industry was to keep society in the dark.

These were the ideas to which Davy hoped to give practical expression in the 1925 election. The days of sending in a squadron or two of mounted, baton-wielding cockies to sort out the rebellious working class were over. Those sorts of tactics merely hardened the resolve of capitalism’s enemies and provided them with the type of symbols public relations experts long for. If big business wanted socialism kept safely at the margins of the political arena, it needed to understand and embrace Lippmann’s art of public manipulation, and — most importantly — be prepared to pay for it.

Reform’s wealthy backers responded positively to Davy’s pitch, and he was given a free hand to run the most up-to-date and innovative election campaign New Zealand had ever seen. As Diana Beaglehole puts it in the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography:

Employing the latest advertising techniques for the first time at a New Zealand election, he focused attention not on the party or its candidates, but on the leader, Prime Minister Gordon Coates. New Zealanders were urged to take ‘Coats off with Coates’, ‘the man who gets things done’, to vote for ‘Coates and Confidence’, ‘Coates and Certainties’. Appeals were made to patriotism, women voters were targeted, and the business community was promised ‘more business in Government, less Government in business’. Nothing was left to chance, ‘Coates’ candidates’ and their committees were issued with booklets, briefing them on how to best run their campaigns. The electorate responded by giving Reform its greatest victory and Davy gained a reputation as a superb political organiser.

With 46.7 percent of the votes cast and 55 seats, Reform and its leader appeared to be on the verge of exercising the sort of easy political hegemony last wielded by Seddon in the 1890s. The Liberals themselves, running under the new name of ‘National’, suffered grievously, losing nearly half their caucus. Labour, too, fared badly. Although its share of the vote went up slightly, its parliamentary contingent shrank from seventeen to twelve. Davy’s backers could hardly believe their luck.

But appearances were deceptive. By 1926 New Zealand was fighting against a strong economic headwind and Coates was looking for ways to weather the storm. As the first New Zealand prime minister actually born in this country, he demonstrated a considerably less deferential approach to dominion governance than his British-born predecessors. A successful Northland farmer and a war hero, Coates had a freewheeling and gregarious personality — John A. Lee dubbed him the ‘jazz Premier’. Throughout his career he consistently displayed a progressive and pragmatic flexibility towards the nation’s ills that left many of his conservative, urban-based colleagues feeling decidedly uneasy.

A succession of economic interventions and social initiatives under- taken by Coates throughout 1926 and 1927 (control of butter marketing, public transport licensing, state-funded family allowances) confirmed the growing suspicion among the Auckland business community that the man they had paid Davy to sell to the New Zealand public harboured dangerous illusions about the capacity of the state to both restrain and reorder the operations of the marketplace. To make matters worse, the relationship between Coates, Davy and the Reform rank and file had become increasingly strained as evidence accumulated concerning the political wizard’s unethical conduct of party affairs. By the end of 1926, Davy and Reform had parted company. According to Beaglehole: ‘Davy maintained he had resigned because

the party was being “governed autocratically” and he objected to its “socialistic legislation”.’

But this was very far from being the end of Mr Davy. In June 1927, one J.W.S. McArthur, an Auckland timber merchant, paid Davy the sum of £1,300 (roughly $200,000 in today’s money) to bring down Coates’ government. Since Davy had been careful to take with him copies of the Reform Party’s membership, canvassing and donation records before he left its employ, this was not quite the daunting assignment it appeared to be. By August he was hard at work soliciting support for a pre-party vehicle which he christened the United New Zealand Political Organisation. Such was the aura of political sorcery surrounding Davy’s name that by the following April he had convinced the ‘National’ Party leader, George Forbes, and most of the ‘independent’ flotsam and jetsam floating about in the parliamentary shallows to join him in launching the United Party. Knowing that to defeat Coates he would need another ‘presidential’ candidate, Davy took the precaution of securing the prior consent of the indefatigable Sir Joseph Ward to be called forward and (after long and careful consideration) to dutifully accept the new party’s leadership.

Davy’s political genius lay in his ability to keep the ends he was pursuing securely isolated from the means required to achieve them. The new United Party was conceived by its right-wing business sponsors as a shield against the full-scale socialism of the Labour Party and what they saw as Coates’ ad hoc version of the same thing. It was also to be their best guarantee that New Zealand’s economy would be properly managed according to orthodox capitalist principles. To the electorate, however, Davy cynically misrepresented his creation as being almost the exact opposite of its sponsors’ vision. As far as the voters

knew, the United Party was the old Liberal Party reborn, and Ward, the ‘financial wizard’ of the 1890s, became their unlikely saviour.

Proud, narcissistic, mentally frail and suffering from the onset of diabetes, it is most unlikely that Ward was ever viewed as a long-term proposition by Davy and his backers. This raises some rather disquieting questions about one of the most notorious incidents in New Zealand politics — the £70 million promise. Michael Bassett, in his 1983 monograph Three Party Politics in New Zealand, casts this extraordinary event in terms of a simple faux pas:

Mis-reading his speech notes, Sir Joseph Ward promised at United’s campaign opening in Auckland to borrow abroad £70 million [roughly $9 billion in today’s money] in one year for the purpose of lending it to ‘settlers’ and ‘home builders’ and ‘advancing the prosperity of the Dominion’. Handled astutely by the unscrupulous A.E. Davy . . . Sir Joseph Ward’s campaign riveted attention on this new, non-Labour alternative to the seemingly permanent Reform Government . . .

But wasn’t ‘permanent government’ precisely what the Right had in mind? The outward colour of that government was immaterial to Davy so long as it continued to serve the interests of the rural and commercial elites who paid him, and blocked the socialists’ path to power. This was not the sort of thing one could say out loud, of course, but it is difficult to discern any other objective in the extraordinarily cynical political behaviour of Davy and his allies. Ward may have misread his notes, or he may have innocently delivered the lines Davy had written for him. Obviously the £70 million promise was nonsense — as every person with an ounce of sense immediately realised — but it served Davy’s purposes admirably. As Bassett puts it: ‘Like a cardboard replica of Seddon’s Liberal coalition, it won seats in all sections of the country, principally at Reform’s expense.’

When all the votes had been counted the United Party had won seats, Reform 28 and Labour nineteen, with a further six seats shared between ‘Independent Liberal’ (four) the Country Party (one) and an independent. How Mr McArthur, the Auckland timber merchant, must have beamed with satisfaction. The £1,300 he had paid Davy to ‘organise nationally against the government’ had been exceptionally well spent. With the summoning of Parliament, it swiftly became clear that Coates’ days as Premier were over. Unable to see past Massey’s legacy, Labour joined with United in a motion of no confidence against their traditional Reform opponents, and on Friday 7 December 1928 the ‘socialistic’ government of Gordon Coates fell.

The events of the next four years, viewed from the perspective of the early twenty-first century, are bathed in all the fitful luminescence of decaying black and white fi lm. There are Davy and his parliamentary marionettes

dancing jerkily at the front of the political stage, while behind him, projected upon a giant screen, are the familiar images of the period: the Model-T Fords, the cloche caps, the droll scenes of holidaymakers bathing at the seaside. Long-dead New Zealanders, smiling bravely at the whirring camera. Then, very slowly, as the 1920s draw to a close, the mood changes, becomes sombre — almost threatening. We see Ward, his wheelchair swathed in a blanket, recording a ‘talkie’ from his garden adjoining the Heretaunga Golf Course in January 1930. And there he is again, in a hearse, in July of that same year — dead at last after a career spanning 40 years.

The newsreels from America and Europe contain even bleaker scenes: long queues of hungry men looking for work; the streets of European capitals filled with surging crowds, mounted police and hysterical politicians. Back in New Zealand, the government has finally begun to count the unemployed: the numbers fl ash by: 274; 588; 2466; 6000; 23,000; 38,000; 51,000 — onwards and upwards, rising like a great wave above a land grown ominously silent. Mr Davy’s political puppet show grows more manic as the economy spirals downwards into the worst depression in the nation’s history. The ‘permanent government’ ploughs on, the peripatetic Davy swapping sides according to need. There is Ward’s replacement — the red-faced and ponderous George Forbes — shaking hands with Gordon Coates as the Reform Party leader reluctantly assumes responsibility for Public Works in the new United- Reform coalition government. It is now September 1931 — two months before the next general election.

The image of the 1931 election with which New Zealanders are most familiar (although many do not realise it) is of the vast crowd gathered outside the offices of the Evening Post on

election night in anticipation of a Labour victory. It is often assumed that the famous photograph (a sea of upturned hats!) records the Labour landslide of November 1935. But entirely absent from that dispiriting December evening in 1931 is the great surge of hope and relief that will fl ow through the working class communities of New Zealand in four years’ time. To be sure, the ravages of the Depression have boosted the size of Labour’s ‘democratic public’ from a quarter to a third of the dominion’s population, but in rural and provincial centres the new ‘National’ government of Forbes and Coates continues to hold sway. The working men who had come to witness Labour’s red dawn trudged back to their homes with their heads down. Labour had won 33.68 percent of the votes and 25 seats, but the ‘permanent government’ had taken 52 seats and a crushing 58.5 percent of the popular vote.

In The Quest for Security in New Zealand the socialist historian Bill Sutch noted grimly that: ‘The country, having sown the wind, began to reap the whirlwind.’

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Copyright Chris Trotter 2007

Somone once asked me if I'd like to run the chain of bars they were buying in Sydney. I said I thought that might be interesting. My friend the barrister told me I should think twice. Pubs in New South Wales? Corrupt cops. Organised crime. Stay out of it, he said. There's a bad-cop stench coming off my newspaper this morning, and I hope we won't be hearing too many more echoes of the Fitzgerald inquiry.

Sydney. Every time we go over, I make noises about picking up sticks and living there for a while. One day.

Public Address Radio will be there next week interviewing New Zealanders who've made the move and are doing interesting things in Australia. We've lined up some good people, but we can always do with more. If you have a story for us we'll be pleased to add you to the schedule, or at least buy you a drink as a loyal Sydney PA reader. Just click the button. We'll be flying out on Wednesday.