KEY POINTS:
It's time to come clean. I'm to blame for launching Mike Moore's career as a columnnist, in, as it happens, a short-lived Labour Party paper controlled by Jim Anderton, then Auckland regional secretary of the party. What did I unleash?
It was the mid-1960s, I was part-timing at
university and Mike was a teenage driver for printing firm Cox and Dawes. For someone who went on to head the World Trade Organisation, he'd probably prefer not to be reminded of the topic of his maiden musings. It was a call to ban all car imports and create a totally protected local car industry pumping out just two or three models. I don't recall whether you had a choice of colour.
Years later, he turned up on my doorstep in a Crown limousine to remind me of this and to ask me to pen his biography. I pleaded a prior engagement. He dashed one off himself. Oh dear, my fault again.
At least that first column stuck to the point, which can't be said for his latest stirrings. Talk about the ramblings of the bar room philosopher. Just why he's launched his latest assault on Helen Clark, I don't really know or care. But I do bridle at his cavalier disregard for simple historic facts.
In his tirade against Jim Anderton, for instance, he writes "not many know that Norm Kirk kicked him out of the party when he was right-wing, anti-abortion, anti-gay, and with Roger Douglas, wanted to remove the unions from the party." Not many would know that because none of it is true, except, perhaps, the anti-abortion thing. Which in the old Labour Party would hardly have made him unique.
But certainly Kirk did not kick him out of the party. Even if he'd wanted to, he could not have, because he wasn't president at the time. Auckland Central MP Norm Douglas was. Nor did Mr Anderton or his fellow reformers want to kick the unions out of the party - they just wanted to force the union heavies to share power with the branch membership, who were rapidly becoming the largest group of party supporters. Mr Moore might have been too young to attend the tumultuous R-rated 1967 annual conference to witness the climax of this mighty power struggle but he owes it to history to get the facts right.
I was one of the wide-eyed Princes Street branch delegates bussed down to Wellington to try and counter the handful of union heavies who each wielded "card votes" numbering in some cases hundreds of votes apiece. Prior to the battle, Mr Anderton, Guy Chapman and historian Mike Bassett had drawn up the notorious "Red Book" proposing a radical reform of party structure. This was distributed throughout the party. Horrified union bosses struck back, Norm Douglas ordering all copies be sent back to headquarters for destruction. Amazingly, most were.
In the Wellington Town Hall that day, the heavies tried to put the frighteners on Mr Anderton before the battle proper began. But despite the reform remits having been expunged from the agenda, he rose to question this. Red-faced union boss and acting chairman Jim Collins glared down from the stage and yelled, "Shut your gate, Anderton."
The hall erupted. Fred Gerbic, later to become MP for Onehunga, rose and moved an unlimited extension of time for Mr Anderton. It was just after lunch and most of the union bosses, particularly the top table with their card votes, were still knocking back their pub lunches. The Gerbic vote was passed almost unanimously by the cheering branch members, who'd sensibly stuck to packed sandwiches. Mr Douglas and his cronies had to rush back from Bellamy's to quell the grassroots rebellion. Union rule was quickly restored and Mr Anderton, theatrically swanning out of the hall soon after, resigned from his job as regional party secretary. He soon emerged as an organiser-fund raiser for the Catholic Church in Auckland, letting his party membership lapse.
Small world that it is, it was Moore ally Mike Bassett who joined him up again in 1971 so that he could stand for the Labour ticket on the Auckland City Council alongside Mr Bassett, Cath Tizard and Alec Dreaver. By 1979, he was party president, thanks largely to branch support. His reputation for being anti-union dogged him for years. It took a term or two of rule under the likes of Roger Douglas and Mike Moore to shake that demon. Those, Mike, are the facts.
