Salient. Victoria University Student Newspaper. Volume. 34, Number 12. June 16, 1971

The Once and Sometime Con

The Once and Sometime Con

I went down to the Town Hall the other week and they were having this Labour Party Conference. They had a table just inside the door too, and there were match-books on it with Norm Kirk's phizz on one side, but when I asked the girl for some she said that they were three cents each. I though of driving these latter day money changers out of the socialist temple, but when I thought about it it seemed that nobody would have got the point. In the land of the blind one-eyed is usually beaten about the head with sticks, so I sat and looked around instead.

When I came away I was puzzled by some things, and worried by others. The first thing that puzzled me was the great to-do about the election of someone called Hirschfeld to the National Executive. I knew quite a few of the people there and they've always struck me as sane, sensible folk. But they were very excited and pleased and running around telling each other how marvellous it was. I don't know much about Hirschfeld, although I know what he looks like because I've seen him on television quite a lot. But it seems to me that apart from having longer hair and a bigger car than most members of the old guard of the party, he doesn't differ from them a great deal. Both the old guard and the group that Hirschfeld seems to lead have views as sad as turnip juice on most issues. I suppose the trouble with the left is that they haven't had a single new revolutionary idea for about 2,000 years, so even they have trouble simulating enthusiasm for what they have got. Even if it were radical in any sense of the word, the election of one man to a committee serves only to neutralise him. Nothing suffocates a radical as quickly as co-option into the elite. But we're not talking about radicals here, are we, so it doesn't make any odds.

Photo of a man with a mostache

Another thing that puzzled me was the excitement generated by the passing of some radical remits. Some of them were radical, believe me, and the most radical thing of all about them was that the Labour Party Conference passed them. But apparently the fools thought they were framing party policy for the next election. Any Stage I political scietist would be able to tell them (and there were quite a few honours level political scientists among the delegates who should have known better), that election policy is decided by the policy committee, over which conference has minimal control. It's the creature of the parliamentary Labour Party, a subcommittee of caucus to all intents and purposes, because the majority of its members are MP's. Any other member is a decoration. That it should be controlled by MP's is perhaps only right. After all, they're the ones who have to go out and sell their own version of sackcloth and ashes to the electorate every three years, not the conference. The mass of Labour voters are not, strange to say, the vanguard of the proletariat marching in blue overalls, arm in arm in serried ranks toward a glorious socialist future. Most of them wouldn't be seen dead in a pair of overalls outside working hours, and quite a few of them within working hours too. To them the dilemmas of twentieth century man have got nothing to do with women's liberation, or homosexual law reform, or withdrawal from Seato, or equal rights for woodlice, or whatever it is that's the current enthusiasm of the fruit juice drinkers and ninety mile hikers on the radical fringes of the Labour Party. To a representative Labour voter the major dilemma of the twentieth century is more likely to be how to preserve your personal dignity and run for the bus at the same time. (That's an important problem by the way. The current solution seems to be a stifflegged cross between a stumble and a galumph.) Barry Humphries wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that Mrs Norm Everidge has a lot of relatives living in New Zealand. Labour voters may not know anything about politics, but they know what they don't like, and a lot of it is the sort of radical remits passed at conference this year. I'll lay even money with anyone that withdrawal from Seato won't be the brightest jewel in the diadem of Labour's election manifesto when Fatcat Kirk and his merry men draft it for the next election. Nor will endorsement of the Wolverhampton Report. If conference goes mildly radical that's nothing to shout about. On the contrary. It only means that the gap between the conference and the electorate has got wider. It's the electorate who decides who's going into Parliament, not the conference of the New Zealand Labour Party, and if the parliamentary party are going to do any genuflecting in November 1972 it's not going to be towards the conference.

There was something else I noticed too. There were a lot of northern carpetbaggers there. I suppose that it's only to be expected when it looks as if Labour is going to capture the Treasury bench, that there should be a frantic snatching at the bandwaggon. Everyone wants a chance to whip the horses...sorry, electorate. There'll probably be more carpetbaggers next year. It'll be interesting to see who they are. 'Radical chic' Tom Wolfe calls it.

I left the conference with a curious feeling in my mind that I'd been to a play by Samuel Becket. There was an air of grotesque reality about the unreality of it all. Faction X squabbling with cabal Y, group separated from group by chasms of hairswidth, and behaving as if the gap was a hundred miles wide, earnest people running their meaningless errands in the corridors of power, television cameras, commentators, all the paraphenalia that goes with the scenario of a political party in the seventies.

I walked back to my office. 'Been to the conference', I announced to a colleague as I walked in the door. My colleague looked blank; 'Conference? What conference?' Then her face cleared. 'Oh yes. The Poultry Breeders' Association. Anything interesting there?'