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THE LABOUR FLAG.
[Parody of the working class song by Conrad Bollinger]
The Labour flag Is palest pink.
It's so much nicer don't you think
It used to be a deeper dye
But that was in the days gone by.
So raise the pale pink standard high
And keep it in the public eye,
And never let a remit pass
That might offend the middle class.
"Good things of day begin to droop and drowse Whiles night's black agents to their preys do rouse."
- Macbeth: Act 111 Scene ii
While a lot of moderately good New Zealanders were drooping and drowsing under the stifling regime of Rob Muldoon, something nasty was being brewed up for them in the inner councils of the political party laughingly known as Labour.
For some ageing New Zealanders of simple faith this was a political party which had inherited from the Thirties an honourable name in the country's politics.
Forget the post-war paralysis of the Party, the sucking up to the United States over Korea, the re-introduction of peacetime conscription, (a means of supporting capitalism that some older Labour MPs had gone to jail to oppose).
Forget the bravery of Walter Nash's "neither for nor against" attitude to the Waterside lockout, in the Tory attack on unions, or the cowardly indifference of Parliamentary Labour to the Vietnam war and its servile inaction in the face of the 1977 extension of Security Intelligence Service powers. Every decade since World War 2 had produced some betrayal of old principles.
But, for long time believers, the Labour Party, with all its sins, had built up employment, health services, education, the welfare state and local industry, had widened state enterprise -and with the help of the war had managed all this in defiance of the blackmail of British capital. It had built a consensus on employment and welfare that had lasted 50 years and even persisted into the attempts by Muldoon to keep the country away from the universal stagnation of capitalism that took hold in the 70s. "Poverty in a land of plenty" was to be shunned by Labour and National alike.
There was something fine to remember about Labour. There were still older folk who had Mickey Savage's photo on their walls to remind them how Labour of the Thirties saved them from the world depression and the right wing remedies that had oppressed the people.
Still these were a dying breed and were replaced each year by those who had emerged to enjoy the benefits of the past without knowing how these had come about. All they knew was the post war reconstruction boom that dragged NZ along in its wake. It seemed to them that capitalism had found a way to expand infinitely.
So, as those who had learned the sharp lessons of the Thirties departed the scene, there took centre stage a generation that was to be faced with the old problems writ larger, but neither the understanding nor the will to do anything effective about them.
By the early eighties Muldoon's "Think Big" policies were proving to build debt rather than a new utopia. He pronounced a wage/price freeze to stem inflation. The wage freeze worked but overseas prices continued to soar and many prices rose.
Would the unions stand this selective oppression? Would not the country rock to the sound of feet on the pavements as unions fought the 1982 wage freeze?
Unfortunately not. Something similar had happened to unions and their members in the post war boom as had occurred to the general public. Even worse, the unions had long started to grow flabby under the easy options of compulsory unionism. Muldoon may have known he was no risk in freezing wages.
With a few honourable exceptions unions had become inert collectors of member subscriptions, but without much connection in struggle with their members. This was matched by attitudes among members which saw the union movement as the "game" of some odd individuals, who by and large did nothing for them but take their money.
The situation was not helped by the fact that many awards had minimum pay rates which bore no relation to the higher rates paid by employers in the post war boom where anxiety for profit called for more workers, whatever the cost might be.
BY 1984 both NZ workers and their unions were sitting ducks for the attack of capital. Though few saw it in these terms, the situation was ready for a class attack on the property, wages, jobs, health, welfare services and organisations of working class people.
Who better to do this than the lineal descendants of the Labour Party of the Thirties - Lange, Moore, Douglas, Prebble, Clark - to name those who were, or soon became, prominent in NZ parliamentary politics. "By their fruits shall ye know them" - Labour, new style, had turned sour on the working class.
As Labour apologists have often protested since, things were different in the 80s. NZ was no longer a slightly developed economy open to state enterprise and growth of industry generally. We no longer had imperial preference from a Britain with is world wide exploitation of "lesser breeds." We no longer had the discipline of wartime, and the illusion of fighting for all.
By contrast with the Thirties the internal possibilities were not there, and external relations such as trade were stagnating in the general decomposition of the capitalist system. The new situation could not sustain the old sort of measures which even in their reduced form were placing unacceptable burdens on the rate of profit.
The new measures being worked out by Labour (in concert with market economists and local capitalists) would have to aim at something different from the general welfare of the working people. They had to be aimed at the protection of the rate of profit and reduction of taxes for companies and the rich to kick start the capitalist cycle again. "New investment" would also have to be given free reign, including free entry of overseas money and takeovers.
Not many people realised this was going on. Newspapers didn't know about it, or at least didn't report it if they knew; unions wooed Labour for changes from the Muldoon freeze as if Labour was really the old peoples party.
As we shall see later, even when the real facts about Labour became known to unions early in 1984 they seemed reluctant to believe it was happening. Labour and National had always been different hadn't they? And wasn't Labour on the side of the people?
The Labour wreckers of the society built in the Thirties had the advantage of an initial incredulity that they would do anything as treacherous as they were contemplating. This sort of incredulity has been to the advantage of every right wing or fascist regime. People can't believe that these chaps they know could possibly turn out to be such bastards.
But right wingers invariably do. In their pantheon of gods the God of Capital reigns over all and its needs drives them to do whatever filthy tricks that they feel is useful to assuaging their deity. This, they always claim, is just doing what the "real world" requires, ignoring the fact that we all make the real world today and remake it tomorrow.
The question is, who gets the benefits of our toil? That, of course, was an unknown concept for many of the innocent public of the 80s. Things had gone wrong, to be sure, but some charismatic leader could turn it all around. Capitalism was not one system among many before it but all that there could be. You just had to adjust it, somehow, and it would run right.
The concept that capitalism might be on its last legs was an unknown idea. The thought that capital must be the beneficiary of public finance, assets and tax breaks, if it was to "recover" was indeed in the minds of businessmen, but it was alien to the average voter. Even as the 80s drew on and these things began to happen the incredulity persisted. How could this be? And the lying explanations of Labour stilled the doubts.
There are usually people who have some idea of what dirty deals are being done behind the backs of the public. One group of these are the intuitive critics from the Left, who always suspect right wing and social democrat governments of working for capitalism above all things. Sometimes these critics are wrong, but not often. It is a good rule of thumb to suspect the worst of Tory and Labour parties - and usually in time your suspicions are validated.
Left critics are seldom able to listen to what is going on in the centres of decision making. But there are other social groups who know more accurately and more extensively just what is being hatched by governments or prospective governments in the initial stages.
One such grouping in the early 80s was the trade union movement. Its knowledge was better than most. The unions could not expect a right wing government to tell them what it planned, but unions did have contacts with Labour which in fact tipped off the trade union movement on two occasions in 1984, before Labour was elected, that something was up.
The first and dramatic occasion was the consultation by Labour's shadow Finance Committee, headed by Roger Douglas, with an economist working for the Federation of Labour.
The economist, (new and temporary in the job) had the initiative to report to the FOL the strange things proposed by the Finance Committee. He even had a paper going into three pages to back up his startled impressions of what Labour would be doing.
In brief the paper showed Labour was intending to turn around the NZ economy by devaluation, with no compensation for the workers to meet the increased cost of living and at the same time business was to be assisted by various improvements in taxation.
This unexpected emphasis from a Labour Party outraged the young economists of the FOL and Combined State Unions, Rob Campbell and Peter Harris. Both wanted some discussion on this directly with the Labour Party, and as a consequence there was arranged one of the infrequent meetings of the Joint Council of Labour, a group at which the two "wings" of the Labour movement, political and union, could air any issues they wished. It had not met for some time, but election year seemed an apt occasion, as did the strange new policies. FOL president Jim Knox was in a twitter about the whole thing. A Labour supporter himself, he did not relish a confrontation with the parliamentary "wing" but in the light of the facts little choice.
When the day came the Combined State Unions where short of the required number of delegates to the Joint Council and so as assistant secretary I was asked to go along to make up the CSU numbers. (The CSU was always afraid that if they went with less than a full delegation the FOL might cut back our numbers - scarcely a trusting attitude toward a brother union group.)
At due time the Labour party leaders arrived - Lange, Palmer, Douglas, Isbey and one or two others. Hesitantly Jim Knox raised the question of the paper from the Finance Committee of the Labour Party. In his best lawyers rounded tones Lange put our minds at rest. "That paper," he intoned, "has no status. No status at all." Douglas chimed in: "We have the same aim as you - to reduce unemployment."
Over eager to avoid any unpleasantness Knox immediately accepted the Lange statement - no questions about the tendency in the paper, no questions about what Labour would actually do for the workers, just a ready acceptance that the paper and the economists meeting with the Finance Committee could be taken as not having existed.
It was agreed that a committee be set up to talk about the economic policies Labour proposed to follow.
This committee met a few times before Muldoon's announcement of a snap election, at which point the Labour Party announced a pro business slate of economic promises in line with the "no status" paper the union leaders already knew about. This troubled some union leaders and in a note to the Combined State Unions Peter Harris, a union rep on the committee discussing Labour policy, commented that with the snap election only weeks away it would not be good tactics to publicly berate Labour for its double speak.
