Austin Mitchell - The Pavlova Omnibus

You can now tell Government from Opposition. Next distinguish between Labour and National and you can follow our endless permutations, for Labour in opposition is as different from Labour in power as National is from Labour. Go to the party conferences. At National’s, women wear hats, earnest young men glasses, and older delegates have weatherbeaten faces and thornproof suits. The platform used to be draped with the Union Jack, the better to disguise the party’s vigorous pursuit of the American alliance. Conversation between delegates will avoid politics and concentrate on stomach troubles, heart complaints and other ailments until you’re not sure whether it’s a party conference or an organ recital. At the Labour conference there will be a smattering of beards and long hair, a friendly chaos will prevail, and a succession of young men will make challenging speeches on the need to win young voters, then disappear for ever having failed to secure immediate election to the National Executive since the qualifying age is sixty-five.

At branch level Nationalists are supposed to meet once a year. They rarely get together more often. Labour’s are supposed to meet once a month. They manage once a year. Nationalists get a speaker on flower arrangement to discuss the Cabinet reshuffle. With Labour, the euchre report is more obsessive. Despite such powerful counter-attractions to television, both sides find it difficult to get a quorum. Those prepared to put up with the boredom in the hope of becoming High Commissioner to Australia are few.

Woe betide anyone who manages to overcome the insuperable difficulty of actually finding a party branch (for they are usually better concealed than communist cells). I remember my first Labour Party branch meeting in Dunedin and the extravagant welcome I got as the symptom of a revival of youthful interest, being the only person present under sixty. Two old ladies specially collected from Parkside Home to make a quorum regularly interjected, ‘I’m seventy-nine you know’ into our discussions—their sole contribution. My rise was rapid. At the first meeting I was elected delegate to the Labour Representation Committee. At the second, branch chairman. At the third, the young Mitchell was nominated to the City Council ticket. At the fourth, I was asked to go forward as the branch’s nominee for the safe Labour seat in which we were the only form of Labour life still extant. At this point I left for England, not considering myself ready to take over the party leadership by attending a fifth meeting.

The same differences and similarities continue right up the party ladder. National, respected by many, and particularly themselves, as the party of efficiency, runs smoothly because it employs professionals to do the donkey work so the members can be free to prepare the supper. Labour shambles along by imposing an interminable burden of raffle selling which transforms members into walking Amplex advertisements, avoided by all but the unsuspecting. Paperwork, also cuts down the time available for the really important discussions on how hard things were in the depression and how easy life is for young people. This latter conviction is shared by National Party branches, particularly in the country where branches are Federated Farmers meetings in another guise.

Macdonald’s Law, named after a famous bowls player who succeeded for three decades in disguising the fact that the Labour Party National Executive had ceased to meet in 1940, states that politics is diluted in proportion to membership. The more members a party has, the more time is consumed on organisational matters, reports, remits and amendments. Thus the larger party is the happier. It is consumed with constant and completely apolitical activity, rather like the sorcerer’s apprentice. This leaves the candidates and M.Ps free to get on with taking political decisions behind closed doors. As the law predicts, political activity is lowest in the National Party with over 200,000 members, higher in the Labour Party with 10,000, higher still in Social Credit.

A variation on Macdonald’s Law is Wilson’s Law of Political Altitude. Politics are diluted by altitude. Labour and National branches will both animatedly discuss the need to restore hanging, corporal punishment and firm discipline. Both will feel the welfare state encourages scroungers. Higher up the organisational ladder there is little time for such informed discussion. Organisational imperatives force politics out. Thus the Labour Party’s New Zealand executive has no higher political thought than what time the tea and biscuits will be served. Similarly, when asked in an interview why he had struggled to the top of the party pyramid, one Dominion president of the National Party replied, ‘Because it is there’.

Now you must differentiate by policies. The Poms disguise basic greed as political philosophy; the Americans hire a public relations firm to paint it as pure altruism. Kiwi politicians are blunter, ever ready to call a spade a prohibited immigrant. ‘Gimmee’ is rarely presented as the advancement of welfare and the socially just society; ‘Lemmee’ only occasionally comes out as the need to stimulate the dynamics of competition. Compared with political debate overseas, both parties restrict themselves to the exchange of instinctive grunts, which is the reason why the ever-tortuous English mistake New Zealand politics for dull.

First then the little clues. Both parties are political archaeologists constantly unearthing the past. Nationalists will talk about any, or all of the following:

1974 and industrial unrest.

1957 and $100 rebates.

1958 and Black Budgets and/or import restrictions, rationing controls, restrictions and shortages.

1943 and burnt ballot papers.

Danger of state ownership of all property.

Reminder that the other side opposed sales of state houses.

Iniquities of land sales control and possibility of restoration.

Threat of nationalisation of all business down to the corner dairy and suspicion that the recent (1932) dropping of the socialisation objective was insincere.

Labour men sling different ritual incantations back:

1972 and industrial unrest.

1967 or 1970 and mini-budgets.

Abolition of subsidies and free school milk with figures on increased incidence of rickets.

1957 and 25% rebates up to a maximum of $150.

1958 when the party attacked capitalisation of family benefit.

1938 when other side opposed social security (‘organised lunacy’).

1932 and responsibility for Depression. (This last is a concession to the slowly dwindling number of Labour men still running against the Coalition Government.)

Political debate like this will make the task of the future historian impossible, like an archaeologist reconstructing a civilisation on a site which has been progressively looted by bands of desperadoes (the politicians) and then picked over by coolies (the party researchers).

Policies spring from the class conflict of have-mores against have-lesses. Labour harps on education, social security, full employment and housing—things relevant to the preoccupations of what the Queen Mother would call ‘the little people’. National talks about farming, exports, and the American alliance, for they worship all things American, particularly dollars. They will claim that taxes have been reduced, in 93 of the 74 years of National government, without explaining why you’re paying more than you were five years ago.

After studying the New Zealand political scene, Chairman Mao evolved his theory of the pedant revolution because of the teachers—primary, secondary and university—who man the Labour desks. The farmers confront them. Yet there are certain conventions of the constitution which insist that even in a National Government the Minister of Education shall be a teacher, if a presentable one is available, to show the portfolio isn’t important. The Minister of Agriculture has to be a farmer to show that it is. The Minister of Finance has to be a man the people love to hate: an aloof, austere figure, waiting like an inverse Micawber for things to turn down. Collective hates can then be concentrated on him, so that the Prime Minister can get on with his real job of being loved. The least successful Finance Minister of modern times, Mr Lake, was so because he was too nice and cheerful and made people feel good and they went out and did dangerous things like spending money. On his death the government considered offering the job to Allen Klein on a commission basis. They eventually compromised on Mr Muldoon (R.21) because of the way his lip curled at the thought of freezes and squeezes. Just in case he should get those delusions of optimism, which have been known to overtake some Finance Ministers at election time, he was carefully watched over by the Monetary and Economic Council, liberally supplied with goats’ entrails to warn of impending disasters. With its help Mr Muldoon made a contribution to finance which can only be compared with that of Attila the Hun to Western civilisation.