Hero, rebel or both?
Other than prime ministers and a few controversial ministers of finance, how many New Zealand politicians are remembered past their death or retirement? You could probably count them on the fingers of one hand.
But your short list would have to include Jim Anderton.
Deputy prime minister, leader of three different political parties, MP for 27 years, highly successful Labour Party president, advocate for social justice, critic of neoliberal economic reform, cricket fan, movie nut, unsuccessful mayoral candidate three times over and respected agriculture minister – how do you condense and summarise Anderton’s enormous life?
Historian David Grant is mulling over this exact question in an Addington cafe on the morning after the Christchurch launch of his biography, Anderton: His Life and Times. More than 100 people came along and 77 books were sold on the night – a good number.
Grant spoke at the event, along with Cabinet minister Megan Woods, who was close to Anderton and succeeded him as Wigram MP.
Grant also spotted former MPs Lianne Dalziel and Ruth Dyson, former Christchurch mayor Vicki Buck, new Christchurch deputy mayor Pauline Cotter and other figures from the political past and present in the crowd.
Former Anderton staffers organised the event so of course it ran like clockwork. Anderton used to joke that his electorate secretary was allowed to make one mistake a year. He was nothing if not a driven, persistent perfectionist.
The fond stories flowed. There will be a second opportunity tomorrow when the book launches in a church hall in Wellington.
It’s a hefty book but it could have been larger, Grant says. There was not exactly a shortage of material. Grant had access to 46 boxes from Archives New Zealand. Each box contained at least a dozen manila folders packed with correspondence, press releases, clippings, Hansard excerpts, emails, speeches and so on, including material that was critical of Anderton.
Grant notes that only a couple of prime ministers have more substantial archives. It took him months to sift through it.
First, a brief recap of his life, although brief was never easy with Anderton. He was born in Auckland in 1938. His father was ‘‘a Liverpudlian sea captain of Irish extraction’’ named Matthew Byrne who had jumped ship in New Zealand. He disappeared while his son was still a baby and later died in a rail accident. The boy’s stepfather, Victor Anderton, adopted him.
He was raised in working-class Grey Lynn. Catholicism always provided a strong moral compass. He was a choir boy in church and dux at Seddon Memorial Technical College. He trained as a teacher and became a Catholic Youth Movement organiser. He married Joan Caulfield when he was 23 and they had five children. He joined the Labour Party in 1964 and immediately became vice-president of the Māngere branch.
Organisational skills and hard work combined with a sense of social justice. For a time he owned a superette in Parnell and worked 18-hour days. Later he went into business with his brother, Brian, while working for the party.
Anderton Holdings made shopping trolleys and Anderton was reportedly singled out in Parliament by Prime Minister Robert Muldoon in 1976 for protecting employees who were allegedly Pasifika overstayers.
He became Labour president and was known to be an effective fundraiser and organiser. But he was in the camp that backed leader Bill Rowling when a new faction was forming around deputy leader David Lange and Auckland MPs Roger Douglas, Richard Prebble and Michael Bassett. The bitter ideological schism would shape the 1980s and 1990s.
He moved south to become the MP for Sydenham in 1984 and continued until his retirement in 2011. He kept winning vast majorities, even after he left Labour and contested the seat under the New Labour, Alliance and Progressive banners, and after the electorate became known as Wigram. The personal loyalty on the ground in Christchurch may have been unrivalled.
The rest of the story is well known. Anderton was unable to tolerate the reforms unleashed by Labour’s Rogernomes and left the party – although he always said the party left him.
In time, he was mostly proven right and the Alliance made peace with Labour in 1999, after his former party had drifted back to the centre-left, and Anderton entered a new phase, becoming a distinguished and trusted member of the political establishment. He died in Christchurch in 2018.
‘Like being back in the Depression’
Anderton’s widow, Carole, told Grant she didn’t want a hagiography and Grant was relieved. He didn’t want to write the story of
Saint James of Sydenham, yet the book is still an admiring account.
The Wellington-based Grant is a historian of the left. Previous books include biographies of Labour prime minister Norman Kirk and unionist Ken Douglas.
‘‘I wouldn’t have written about Jim Anderton if I didn’t have empathy for what the man tried to say and do, and what he achieved,’’ Grant says.
‘‘His work on the ground, in these electorates, for the poorer people, the drug addicts, the mentally ill, which took on an even sharper perspective after the sad death of his daughter Philippa.
‘‘He fought hard for those people, and had enormous support in his electorate beyond being a member of a party . . . No-one ever denied his hard work. That was a given.
‘‘And the work Carole did. People would come around to his house and be given clothes and food. It was like being back in the 1930s Depression.’’
That was Sydenham in the 1980s. The rapidity of Rogernomics meant factories closed and unemployment soared.
Anderton was unable to stay quiet when his own party ravaged its supporters. Should he have stayed quiet?
A Newsroom review of the book by economist and historian Brian Easton makes a topical comparison
with another rebel politician, the former Hamilton West MP Gaurav Sharma.
It is a ridiculous comparison on the face of it, as Anderton’s objections were about principle and Sharma’s seem more egodriven, but is there something in the way that New Zealand political parties, especially Labour, don’t cope with dissent well?
Grant thinks our political parties lack the maturity to handle internal criticism.
A by-election was one flashpoint for Anderton. After Labour’s Timaru MP Basil Arthur died in 1985, the party picked a Rotorua lawyer, Jan Walker, rather than a local. She was defeated by farmer Maurice McTigue, a political newcomer.
Arthur had held the seat for more than 20 years but Lange airily dismissed the result as not ‘‘the voice of the people’’. Anderton, who had worked on the ground in Timaru with supporters from Sydenham, went public with his annoyance and criticised his leader.
Always good for a snappy and sarcastic quote, Lange replied that ‘‘Mr Anderton will be as influential on economic policy in the future as he has been in the past’’.
Anderton’s friends in Labour, such as Helen Clark and Margaret Wilson, urged him to stay quiet. ‘‘But that wasn’t his personality,’’
Philip
Right, Anderton soon after moving to Christchurch in 1984.
Grant says. ‘‘He had to express himself forcefully.’’
It’s ancient history but it’s instructive about how political parties work or don’t work. Lange later said Anderton turned from a rottweiler into a spaniel. It could be said that Lange doesn’t always come across well in this account of the fourth Labour government.
The personal costs
The book reveals the personal cost of politics, including family life and friendships.
It is said that Anderton and former Alliance president Matt McCarten never spoke again after the implosion of the Alliance and Anderton was unable to get over what he saw as McCarten’s betrayal of him.
Yet after Anderton’s death, McCarten paid tribute to him as ‘‘one of the few conviction politicians’’.
Grant says the chapter about the Alliance bust-up was the hardest to write. But the most devastating personal cost was Philippa’s suicide in 1993. Grant uncovered a heartfelt and very moving letter Anderton wrote to his daughter a year after her death, when his depression drove him to quit politics briefly.
Every conversation about Anderton also deals in what-ifs. Some have called him the best prime minister New Zealand never
had. A sense of destiny was implied as early as 1974 when Time magazine picked him as a future world leader, alongside Bob Hawke, Joe Biden, Saddam Hussein and Prince Charles. That was when Anderton was merely an aspiring candidate for the Auckland mayoralty.
The blessing or curse of Time magazine may have created expectations he failed to meet, yet it is wrong to see his career as an unfulfilled promise.
In Easton’s what-if fantasy, Anderton never left Labour but built a coalition of rebels in caucus and helped Labour win the 1993 election. An alternative what-if has Rogernomics never happening at all and the pairing of Anderton and Clark naturally succeeding Rowling.
‘‘Here’s another what-if,’’ Grant proposes. ‘‘If MMP had started in 1993, he would have been in a powerful position. He could have done a Labour-Alliance deal and stayed there, and gone right through.’’
Instead, MMP started in 1996, by which time the more conservative NZ First was hoovering up the protest vote. But it is remarkable how close the Alliance came, Grant says.
Anderton was outpolling all others as preferred prime minister in 1994 and the Alliance’s John Wright came within 500 votes of
winning the Selwyn by-election in the same year.
Grant believes that if Tim Shadbolt had not stood for NZ First, the Alliance might have nabbed one of the most traditional National-leaning seats. That shows how disrupted politics was in the early 1990s.
And without being hagiographic, there are ways in which Grant’s biography shows Anderton to have been ahead of his time, despite Lange’s sharp comments.
Philippa’s suicide made him a mental health campaigner. He was an outspoken advocate for free dental care. Another of his great fights was over the banks – his final break with Labour followed the sale of BNZ and Postbank and he was tireless to the point of exhaustion in creating Kiwibank as an alternative.
Viewed from a time of record bank profits and poor dental health, he may have been a prescient political thinker.
‘Standing firm under pressure’
David Grant’s book is not the only re-evaluation of Anderton’s career. Former Alliance cabinet minister Matt Robson is co-producer of a documentary about his former political colleague. The team also includes Anderton’s former private secretary, Sally Griffin, and director Gerd Pohlmann. They are in the final stages of production.
‘‘We have an important story to tell, one which not only gives voice to Jim Anderton’s story of standing firm under pressure against the tide of monetarism that began sweeping the world in the 1980s, but one which gives context to the changes to New Zealand and its people since 1984,’’ Robson says by email.
‘‘How did we resist the destructive Rogernomics wave and end the privatisation of assets, set up a Ministry of Economic Development, establish Kiwibank, implement sustainable regional economic development, introduce paid parental leave and four weeks’ annual leave?’’
Those are the achievements of Anderton and Robson, and others from their party, in government.
‘‘Without doubt the values Jim and we stood for, and still do stand for, are more relevant than ever in today’s globalised world,’’ Robson says. ‘‘The film will refresh memories, and will inspire younger generations eager to learn from history and build a better future.’’
In this telling, Anderton is more than a local MP or a cabinet minister. He becomes a heroic and even legendary example.
Pohlmann and Griffin filmed Anderton for two days in 2017 and a clip that appeared online after Anderton’s death saw him musing about the lack of trust people still have in governments and political parties after Rogernomics. Again, that seemed prescient.
Yet in the same clip he claimed to be an optimist. Viewed from history, he said, Rogernomics is just a blip.
The great escape
When Megan Woods spoke at the book launch, she talked about the Anderton she knew as a local MP.
‘‘I was very conscious that there were people there who had delivered pamphlets for Jim since 1984,’’ she says by phone. ‘‘They didn’t know Wellington Jim. They knew Christchurch Jim.’’
He was more relaxed in the electorate, Woods says. She adds that political biographies often focus on the Wellington side of a career but a book could be written about exceptional local MPs and ‘‘Jim certainly would be one of them’’.
The stories about Anderton and Carole giving away their food and clothes to the needy are true, Woods says, but he was also focused on finding structural solutions.
‘‘I remember driving around with him in the days after the February 2011 earthquake. We were getting to the end of the day, and we hadn’t sorted out a way to get bread and milk for one of the council housing units.
‘‘I said, let’s just go to the supermarket and buy it. He looked at me and said, you won’t have enough money in the world to do that for everyone you represent. Our job is to spend the next few hours finding a way to ensure they get this on an ongoing basis.’’
Anderton was still the MP at that stage. Woods succeeded him later that year. She says his example is why she would never want to be just a list MP.
How long did the bad blood continue with Labour? Woods says if she raised his name in the Labour caucus in 2022, he would be seen as neither a Labour person nor an outsider, but something in between.
‘‘There is respect for the decisions Jim made,’’ she says. ‘‘His path is an important part of our history. He’s seen as part of the wider family, but Jim said to me that he wasn’t going to rejoin the Labour Party. He certainly supported me as a Labour candidate and came door knocking with me and did street corner meetings with me.’’
He helped out after his retirement, running Labour’s successful by-election campaign in Christchurch East in 2013. But his retirement was dominated by a collaboration with former National MP Philip Burdon to get the Christ Church Cathedral repaired.
The pairing both puzzled and inspired people: Burdon had represented blue-blood Fendalton when Anderton was battling across town in Sydenham.
While Anderton may have missed out on the Christchurch mayoralty in 2010 because of the earthquakes, the cathedral campaign will last as a mayorallevel achievement.
Grant captured one last story that says a lot. As Anderton’s health declined, he was shifted to Nazareth House, a Catholic aged care home in Sydenham.
But it wasn’t for him. He was never a fan of taking orders or being told to rest. Dubbing the house ‘‘Colditz’’ and the nurses ‘‘Gestapo’’, he took off with his walker and made the slow trek back home.
People shared the story in his last days with a mix of fondness and exasperation.
Some have called him the best prime minister New Zealand never had. As a biography of Jim Anderton is launched, Matthews looks back at the life of this man of conviction.
‘‘Without doubt the values Jim and we stood for, and still do stand for, are more relevant than ever in today’s globalised world.’’ Matt Robson