Chapter 6

Back in the House in troubled times

Labour held its 1990 annual conference just two weeks after its drubbing at the general election.

Already riven by bitterness and division, the conference was a depressing affair, but expectations of trouble proved unfounded mainly because many of the strongest advocates of Rogernomics were not there.

Labour’s leader Mike Moore warned the conference that Labour could not afford to be a party of division.

‘I hate it when people say the parliamentary Labour Party or the New Zealand Labour Party. There must be only one Labour Party. Surely that’s the lesson we’ve learned. We cannot go into elections arm-wrestling each other,’ he said.

While Moore did not denounce Rogernomics, he signalled a return to more traditional Labour policies and talked about the ‘negotiated economy’. The party president, Ruth Dyson, confirmed the party was returning to its principles but disliked describing it as a ‘lurch to the left’.

Meanwhile, Annette’s new job as chief executive of the Palmerston North Enterprise Board did not bring an end to her political involvement. She was elected to Labour’s executive for the 1991–92 year and was active in the party as she weighed up her options for 1993.

The Labour Party tried to put the bitterness and divisions of the last three years in government behind it. Only six months after getting a hiding in the election a surge in support had Labour ahead of National in the Heylen-TV One opinion poll. In the April 1991 poll, Labour scored 42 per cent support while National could only garner 35 per cent.

The shift in popularity, though, had little to do with newfound enthusiasm for Labour, but rather a growing antipathy to an unpopular National Government. In a con-venient and apposite headline, Ruthanasia (immortalising hard-line finance minister Ruth Richardson) inherited the mantle of the equally apposite Rogernomics.

During its regional conferences in 1991 Rogernomics was rejected, but the economic policy discussed at those meetings papered over policy divisions within the party.

Those divisions played out in the Miramar electorate, previously held by Rogernomics supporter Peter Neilson, who had lost the seat to National’s Graeme Reeves. Miramar’s Kilbirnie branch was ordered to hold fresh elections after accusations there had been a jack-up to get Allan Jenkins elected chairman and he and city councillor Nic Dalton as electorate committee delegates. Both were identified with the left of the party.

That was an attempt to ensure they squeezed out candi-dates from the right of the party. On a broader front, the party had begun its ‘Labour listens’ campaign in an effort to heal the rift between supporters and opponents of Rogernomics. What came from that was a document listing the party’s aims and values to be debated at its 1991 annual conference.

The Evening Post reported: ‘It is, though, a document of generalities by design and the more difficult job of devising specific policies does not start till next year [1992]. In this way the party hierarchy is hoping protagonists on both sides of the Rogernomics fence will not be forced into taking sides at the conference, but instead will build on the consensus already forged during the aims and values campaign.’

Back in Miramar, the right wing of the party claimed a partial victory when taxi driver Garth Harrison, a Rogernomics supporter, was elected chairman of the Kilbirnie branch in a fresh election. One of the electorate delegates came from the right, the other from the left of the party.

Who then to select as the seat’s candidate for the 1993 election? Peter Neilson had already declared he was not interested in another tilt at politics. In October 1991 Annette’s name began to be raised — she had a house in Evans Bay and lived there at the weekends — as a centrist candidate acceptable to both wings of the party, in the same way she had been supported in the Cabinet vote in 1989, but her nomination was by no means certain.

Her path to gaining the Miramar nomination was paved with good food in Palmerston North — discussing her political aspirations in small groups while at the same time supporting Be Your Own Boss businesses like Ken and Helen Kan’s original Monsoon Asian Kitchen and Robert Rimmer’s pasta shop in Broadway. Annette did not underestimate how difficult it would be to gain the Miramar nomination and then to win over a divided electorate. While fallout continued from the years of Rogernomics, Annette hoped that her election to the New Zealand Council of the Labour Party in 1991 was a signal she personally wasn’t in bad odour with the wider party.

Former Labour Miramar MP Peter Neilson’s decision not to stand again made it easier. That reinforced Annette’s conviction that politics was all about a lot of luck and good timing. She still had to convince quite a divided electorate. ‘Miramar was famous for having two AGMs because they would have disagreed with what happened at the first one.

‘So I set about trying to win over the membership. I got the engineers’ union behind me, and quite a number of the branches supporting me. I didn’t get the Service Workers’ Union, the old Servos. The women’s branch, led by Tilly Hunter, didn’t support me, but she was later to become my biggest supporter. I spent a good year or more winning support for the vote to select me. They held the selection in the hall at Kilbirnie and I got the nomination. I can remember on the day I got it I had gone out the back and up the steps at my house at Evans Bay to get my washing, and on the way back down I slipped and fell on my bum. I had to look like I was in good shape at the meeting, but I had this huge bruise on my left cheek for weeks. Anyway, I won the selection, and then I had to set about bringing the other parts of the electorate in.

‘Lovely Mike Hearn, who became my electorate chair, he wasn’t in the engineers, he was in the Servos, but I knew he wanted to support me, so I went and saw him. I knew I had to get the women’s branch on side, so I got a bottle of wine, went round to Tilly Hunter’s house, sat down with her and said, I need your help. We drank the bottle of wine, and she became a firm supporter, and worked for me for many years as an electorate secretary. We stayed friends right up to the minute she died. Her daughter Sue Piper (the Wellington city councillor) and Labour Party historian Peter Franks, her husband who later became my electorate chairman, phoned and said, “Mum’s dying, do you want to come and see her?” I quickly drove up to Vincentian Home where she was and they were there, and I sat beside her holding her hand, and while I was holding her hand she died. It was a real moment. So from being really opposed to me, she ended up being one of my strongest supporters and friends. Her funeral in Strathmore was fascinating. She had my hoardings all around the wall. She had a wooden coffin and people had written all over it. Tilly had been in the Communist Party. There was no religion at the funeral. It was Tilly all over.’

At the time she was selected in July 1992, Annette told the Evening Post: ‘This electorate has been peppered with factions and fighting over the years, but it has subsided. . . . You had to have people who would heal the rift. That is probably one of the reasons I was selected. I am a moderate. I am in the middle of the party.’

Once she was selected Annette began campaigning immediately.

‘I had to campaign to get selected and then campaign to get elected. When I look back now, I never had any doubt that I would win. I don’t know why I felt so confident — Graeme was a pleasant enough man and had a reasonable majority, but he had made no impact. This was just three years after we had been tossed out, but I just felt we were going to win. I campaigned on unemployment and health issues. National’s health reforms really annoyed people. Unemployment went up under us, but under Ruth Richardson it went up even further. I won by about 2500 votes, comfortable enough.’

Much though she enjoyed her work and new friends in Palmerston North, Annette’s focus in 1993 was firmly on winning Miramar and returning to Parliament. ‘Before I went there, I had always thought Palmerston North was a boring place, but it was a great place to work, and there were great people to work with and have fun with.’

There was a happy symmetry between her two parallel lives, running the Enterprise Board and seeking the Miramar seat.

To start with, Judy McGregor completed her PhD on the ‘manufacture of news’ in the 1993 New Zealand election, devoting roughly a third of it to analysis of campaigning and news media strategy in the Miramar electorate. Annette’s campaign newspaper, the Miramar News, became a key feature of one aspect of the doctorate.

At the election-night victory party in Miramar, instead of traditional Labour Party food, strong on sausage rolls and tomato sauce, the faithful were fed on pasta and pasta sauces from Robert Rimmer’s shop in Palmerston North. Robert supplied the pasta to pay off the financial debt he had incurred to Judy McGregor when he set up his shop.

There was one very sad moment for Annette in the run-up to the election — the sudden death from a heart attack in 1992 of former All Black Ken Gray. ‘Ken went for the Porirua nomination when Gerry Wall finished but lost out to Graham Kelly. He then put his name in for Hutt. I supported him. So did Mike Moore. I thought he was a wonderful asset to the Labour Party. I agreed with his principles. I was driving my car when I heard he had died suddenly. His wife Joy rang me and asked to see me. So I went to Grays Road, Porirua, where his farm was, and Ken had been laid out in the lounge, not in a coffin because he was far too large for one. They had to build him a coffin specially. The house was full of people, including ‘Shirley Temple’ [Grahame Thorne], the All Black who became a National MP. I’ll never forget looking at Ken with his massive hands. Joy asked me to speak at the funeral, so I spoke there. It was at Old St Paul’s, and I spoke on behalf of the Labour Party. I’ll never forget him being carried up the aisle. Wilson Whineray was one of the pall-bearers. There were a number of former All Blacks. They could hardly get up the aisle by the time you got the coffin as well. It was such a sad thing. He would have made a fantastic Member of Parliament. He was a man of principle. He had good values. He would have been our [Labour’s] only All Black MP. At least we can say we had an All Black as a candidate.’

While Annette stood in Miramar in 1993, she did not leave her old Horowhenua seat in the lurch.

Darren Hughes, who succeeded Judy Keall in the electorate during the years of the Clark Government, says Annette made sure the party’s local organisation remained in good heart after 1990 and that it kept paying its levies to head office.

‘You had safe seats around the country that were in arrears on their levies, but she said we’ve got to keep operating even though we’re no longer holding the seat because I think she wanted to make sure the locals could choose who the next candidate would be.’

The locals wanted her to stay on, but Hughes says it was clear someone of her calibre needed a safer seat, not one where she remained hostage to the whim of the fortunes of Labour. Miramar, however, was not a safe seat for Labour, as Graeme Reeves had won it for National in 1990.

‘It was the kind of seat you could turn into a safe one, but it wasn’t guaranteed. But when she decided she’d go for that one she brokered the conversation with Judy Keall about coming down from the north, from Glenfield, to run in this seat in the lower North Island, and that was because she wanted to make sure the area had a good champion if we were to win,’ says Hughes.

In July 1992, the same month Annette was selected as Labour’s candidate for Miramar, Michael Cullen, who had replaced David Caygill as finance spokesperson earlier in the year, released Labour’s economic policy outlining the party’s new direction.

According to the paper, the policy would be based on res-ponsible fiscal and monetary policy so there was little change there. But it did signal a more active role for government in the economy, including the use of government power to encourage and support economic and employment growth.

Within days the former Labour Prime Minister, David Lange, had attacked the paper and said it was little different to the National Government’s economic policies and would do nothing for the unemployed, beneficiaries and those on low incomes. The policy was, however, endorsed at Labour’s annual conference in Christchurch in September.

Cullen was blunt when he spoke to delegates and signalled there would be no backtracking from the inflation targeting the previous Labour Government had introduced.

‘Here perhaps is one of the hardest issues for many of us. There are still some who believe that we can achieve more growth with more inflation. That is a terrible snare and delusion.

‘In any case, let us be brutally frank with each other. We in power caused considerable pain in getting inflation down . . . having achieved low inflation we must not surrender it.’

But while that was not music to the ears of many left-wing delegates at the conference, they were appeased by Labour’s more interventionist industrial relations policy and a commitment to involve trade unions and business in industry and economic planning. It was not socialism, but it was not quite Rogernomics either.

Delegates and MPs left that conference feeling confident that the party’s bitter divisions of the recent past had been put behind it and that they had reached a consensus on economic policy. In reality, however, they had simply put a larger plaster on the wound.

Towards the end of the year, there were murmurings about Moore’s leadership, but no coup. While Labour had adopted a new economic direction, even though the change was subtle, not everyone believed Moore had fully repudiated his support for Rogernomics in the previous Labour Government. The rupture between the left and right wings of the party was to come later as their rift spilled into the open once again.

Early in 1993 there were more signs not all was well within the Labour Party. Mike Moore published his latest book — Fighting for New Zealand — and the profits from its sale were to be used to help finance Labour’s election campaign. He set up his own publishing company, the Mike Moore Supporters Club, to publish the book and election material during the year.

In effect it was almost an alternative to the Labour Party organisation. Moore had had a fractious relationship with the president, Ruth Dyson, and his relationship was to be no better with her successor Maryan Street.

Then in March rumours surfaced that his leadership had come under scrutiny before Christmas. Moore acknowledged there was dissatisfaction, saying no one was more frustrated than he was. The public grumblings were short-lived, but it was evidence that all was not well within the party.

But Moore was not alone. The same month the Prime Minister, Jim Bolger, said he had to improve his performance, although he dismissed reports MPs were dissatisfied with his leadership. Yet leaders of both major parties were going into a general election with doubts about their leadership.

In April, Street succeeded Dyson as Labour president, with Dyson standing as a candidate in Lyttelton. Significantly, Street had easily beaten Lloyd Falck, Annette’s campaign manager, in the presidential vote. Falck worked in Moore’s office but remained a close friend and confidant of Annette.

Trevor Mallard too worked in Moore’s office but fell out with Labour’s leader halfway through the term. ‘I don’t want to go into too much detail, but at one stage Mike was not that happy with some of the advice I gave him and told me he wanted a yes man and I indicated I was going to still give him the advice I thought appropriate . . . and that didn’t go down well with Mike. I mean he wasn’t unreasonable about it.’

Ironically, Mallard continued working in the Leader of the Opposition’s office in Parliament but more directly with Richard Prebble. ‘Prebble was one of the best tacticians. I don’t think he was a strategist, but he was a very good political tactician.’

Labour went into the 1993 election campaign with a chance of winning back government. Considering how badly beaten it had been in 1990, it was an amazing turnaround. But, in reality, it was less a reflection of how far Labour had come but more of how unpopular National had become after breaking key election promises and continuing with contentious and radical economic reform.

On election night, there was no clear winner and the country experienced a precursor of what was to come under MMP. Once the special votes were counted National had 50 seats in the 99-seat Parliament, a bare majority to govern. Labour won 45 seats, the Alliance two and New Zealand First two.

But Labour — or at least the Mike Moore faction within the party — was kicking itself because it came so close to winning. Richard Prebble lost Auckland Central, Chris Laidlaw lost Wellington Karori and Helen Clark’s adviser Heather Simpson failed to win back Heretaunga, a seat she should have won.

As well, the difference between the two parties on the popular vote was close. Labour won 34.7 per cent of the vote, with National just ahead on 35.1 per cent, while the Alliance got 18.2 per cent and New Zealand First 8.4 per cent. Had this been an MMP election Labour would have presumably governed with support from the Alliance.

Despite the disappointment of the final result, Mike Moore had led Labour back from the depths of a humiliating defeat in 1990. And Annette King was back in Parliament as the MP for Miramar.

But from a miraculous near victory on the night, Labour was soon to dissolve into an acrimonious and messy leadership coup.