Gordon Campbell Talks To Jim Anderton
Gordon Campbell Talks To Jim Anderton
It is unusual to talk about a 70 year old in terms of untapped potential, but the aura of ‘what might have been’ will always hang over Jim Anderton’s career. New Zealand never got the full benefit of his skills – and conversely, Anderton has never found the right outlet for them, not after his true political soul mate ( ie, the Labour Party) ran off with a bunch of flashier types during the 1980s.
Opinion is still divided on the extent to which
Anderton brought that calamity on himself. The pattern did
repeat itself somewhat down the years, with other, more
transient political partners. Yet much of it also seemed
inevitable. An accident of history made Anderton the
immovable object in the path of Rogernomics the unstoppable
force, and hubris on both sides did the rest. Irish to the
core, Anderton has never backed off from a fight – and
especially not during the 1980s, when the only alternative
was capitulation. A few of his colleagues did manage to
rationalize their caving in as being only a tactical
retreat, but neither Anderton or Labour ( or arguably New
Zealand) have ever completely recovered from the experience.
The Progressives are his current vehicle. If Rodney
Hide had lost in Epsom in 2005, the Progressives would have
Matt Robson in Parliament as well. It was that close. In
his current incarnation as a one man band though, Anderton
seems reasonably content. Since 2000, he has been a serious
parliamentary insider at last – feted for his
administrative skills as a Minister, and still formidably
articulate in the debating chamber,
As the tide went
out on Labour at the last election, Anderton greatly
increased his majority in Wigram, and - these days at least
- he’s a team player around the Cabinet table. Thirty
years too late, it is a vision of what might have been, if
Anderton and his times had been more in sync. Scoop’s
Gordon Campbell talked with Jim Anderton on Tuesday morning.
Campbell
: In the 2005 election Wigram had by quite a long
shot, the highest percentage of informal votes of any
electorate in the country. Why do you think that is
?
Anderton : I haven’t got the faintest idea.
Campbell : Your majority last
time was 8,500, so re-election shouldn’t be a problem
this year. Are you committed to staying in Parliament for
the full three year term?
Anderton. Yep. I
wouldn’t stand if I wasn’t. That would be
pointless.
Campbell : The Progressives got
26,000 nationwide last election. Outside of Wigram, where
are your main centres of support?
Anderton
: Auckland. Mainly around Matt Robson, really. He’s
got quite a large following – both traditional supporters,
and among ethnic groups he’s worked with in various ways,
as new immigrants and so on.
Campbell : In that respect, does the Immigration Bill pose a possible critical division between the Progressives and Labour, given the concerns being expressed by migrant communities about some of the security aspects of the Bill?
Anderton : No, I don’t think so. I haven’t
had any representation from any migrant community on the
Bill. Basically, we’ve had to adjust immigration policy
over time, both from a social perspective as well as
security perspectives. By and large, the immigrant community
I’ve spoken to understand these imperatives. New Zealand
hasn’t been as extreme as many countries.
Campbell : Your own party, Peter Dunne’s and New Zealand First were founded by established politicians. Personally, do you welcome the day when MMP outgrows this ‘personality party’ phase of its evolution?
Anderton : Its inevitable that it will. Its
also inevitable that it did happen that way. After all, I
was in Parliament before MMP as an MP elected outside of the
two party system – which was considered virtually
impossible [under FPP.] In fact, I was the first MP to
leave a major party and get re-elected to Parliament.
That’s how hard it was. Peters was the second. Dunne sort
of, the third, though (laughs) I’m not sure which of the
major parties he left at the time. We were the precursors of
MMP….
The pressure for change in the electoral system came first from the failure of Labour to honour its policy promises, and then National added to that sense of betrayal. There was inexorable pressure for something to happen, that would change that way of acting. I think my election in 1990 was a signal the electorate was prepared to act.
Campbell : By ‘phase of evolution’
I meant that you, Dunne, Peters now face the challenge of
handing over the reins and ensuring that your vehicle
survives you. What steps are you taking to manage the
transition?
Anderton : I don’t have
that sense of…sort of, survival, in terms of parties.
Parties come and go. I’m not a historian, but if you look
back at all the parties that ever existed in democratic
societies that are still the same – or are even ( laughs)
in existence..(shrugs)
Campbell : I’m
not talking about your legacy, I’m talking about your
baby, the Progressives. How do you ensure its survival
?
Anderton : I don’t know that you do.
And I don’t know that you have to concentrate your mind on
it. In many ways, political parties and political
philosophies and policies are creatures of their times. That
comes and goes. At one time in my life, I was the most
popular politician in New Zealand. Now I’m not. You’ve
got to get on with the reality of what’s happening. Its
not a matter of ensuring some kind of legacy, or whatever
– it is a matter of facing the political realities of the
day and doing the best that you can. At the time I opposed
Labour, that seemed the right thing to do. Now the right
thing seems to me to be working co-operatively with Labour.
Campbell : So if the Progressives are to
survive, its up to the Progressives to make that happen ?
Anderton : Yes. That’s right.
Campbell : You once told me that being an electrician was never really a career option - since you’re colour blind, and can’t distinguish between red and green. Were you aware that the Greens Co-Leader, Russel Norman, has the same condition ?
Anderton : I’ll give you the dignity of my silence on that one. (laughs). His performance in the first week of Parliament was enough for me.
Campbell
: Currently, this administration’s achievements
– reducing child poverty, record numbers of people in
work, raising the mimimum wage, lowering state house rents,
making Telecom act competitively, rescuing Air NZ, buying
back Rail, and making it cheaper to get to the doctor - are
simply not getting any political traction. Why not ?
Anderton : That’s political life. What
happens when you change things, people bank them…. And
then they say, what’s next? All these things, like
Kiwibank, are there now. And although I still get identified
with it, there would be many, many younger New Zealanders
who would not even remember that there wasn’t a Kiwibank.
Many young New Zealanders at university, I’m told by
academics, don’t know who Roger Douglas is, and have never
heard of Rob Muldoon. Now, for someone coming from my era (
laughs) that seems impossible! But it’s the reality.
Campbell : They’d probably see you only as the fussbudget who banned their party pills. Does that bother you at all ?
Anderton : No, it
doesn’t bother me. I know we were right to do that. A heck
of a lot of parents who have got a lot more life experience
and wisdom than their children know its right, too. Whether
they thought it was right or not, was not something I’ve
ever taken into calculation. If you look at my track record,
I never worried whether fishermen would oppose me closing
down the Marlborough Sounds for blue cod fishing – because
of course they would – but it was the right thing to do.
Campbell : If the current poll trends
continue, you could be re-fighting in opposition the same
battles against the New Right that you had in the 1980s.
Have you got the energy to do it all over again?
Anderton : Well, I get up at quarter
to six every morning, I’m here at twenty to seven, and I
go home at about eleven o’clock at night. If you talk to
some of the my colleagues, I think they’d say I was one of
the workaholics of the outfit, and have been all my life.
When I can’t do that anymore, or don’t want to do it, I
won’t.
Campbell : Mentally though, is
there an ‘oh no, not again” factor?
Anderton : No, I stare down the barrel of the
reality of life. When you’re ten, or eighteen, or 30, 40,
50 …at each stage, you have a view of life. Now I’m 70.
Ironically, and its one of those things that constantly
amazes me, it hasn’t changed much. I still feel that I
have to keep fighting for things that I believe in, pretty
much as I did when I was eight or nine years old. I’ve
often found myself in a minority of one. (laughs)
Campbell : Someone will have to rebuild the Labour
Party after this election. Is that a task that could inspire
you to finally rejoin them?
Anderton : No.
I’ve often had that put to me. I think…once you know
things, you can’t un-know them. I’ve had the experience
of being part of Labour, and even of leading it in an
organisational sense. We had a parting of the ways, quite
significantly, quite deep. And I can’t undo that, and
wouldn’t want to. It would be like re-writing history in a
way, if I said that none of that really matters.
Campbell : The 1980s battles left too
indelible a mark ?
Anderton : Yes. The
scars are fairly deep. That doesn’t cloud my judgement.
Was it right to encourage Helen Clark to come to the
Alliance conference in 1998 and prepare to go into coalition
government in 1999 and I think the answer is yes.
Am
I sad that the Alliance imploded ? Yes. But were the reasons
for me standing against what the tide was in the Alliance at
the time, right? I viewed them as correct at the time and
still do. I don’t regret one single step at any particular
point. That’s not said as an arrogant thing, because
I’ve had to think very carefully about the steps I’ve
taken in my political career, and always have. They
weren’t off the cuff. I didn’t leave the Labour party
after 26 years as a sort of whim, or because I was feeling a
bit aggrieved. I didn’t start the New Labour Party and
didn’t stand against forces in the Alliance who wanted to
bring down the government, lightly. I did it deliberately,
and would do it again.
Campbell : This
decade, has there been anything this government has done in
office that you fundamentally disagree with
?
Anderton : Not fundamentally. There are
always nuances and emphases and decisions that might be
untimely. Where you might say, I wouldn’t advise that
myself, and I wouldn’t do that, myself.
Campbell
: So you’ve disagreed in a backseat driver sense
this time, rather than over the direction the car has been
headed in ?
Anderton : Yes. As in, I
don’t think that’s a wise decision now. Might be okay in
principle, but if you try it, I think you might get
clobbered around the ears….
Campbell :
What have you and the Progressives achieved in government
that wouldn’t have happened otherwise ?
Anderton : Kiwibank was under the Alliance,
to be fair. But the same process that I used with Kiwibank
I’ve used everywhere else. Like the Fast Forward [
agricultural science research and development] initiative.
Where we got $700 million in an election year, from a
Minister of Finance under pressure for all sorts of things
to be delivered – and this was delivered to a constituency
that demonstrably, wouldn’t reward the government. I
actually give Michael Cullen a huge amount of credit for
that.
If you think about it, the agricultural
community for the next 10 or 15 years – and probably
forever – is going to benefit from this step. The
industry has stumped up with an equal amount of money. It
will be about $2,000 million in the end.
Campbell
: So, you’ve basically put up the venture capital
for farming’s r&d for them ?
Anderton :
That’s right. And that’s for a constituency that won’t
reward Michael Cullen, or the government. When I first put
this up in 2006, I didn’t get too much support for it. I
got a little bit – we got a foot in the door with a little
bit of help for the Pastoral Greenhouse Gas Research
Consortium, and Pastoral 21 – and we got some millions.
But it was relatively small beer, and they were all a bit
disappointed. And I said to them : look, we’ve just
started to say to the government that hey, we’re way
behind the eight ball on all these areas, so lets step it
up. And if you want government to do more, you’ve got to
match it - and then rely on me to open the door a lot wider
the next time. Which is what they did.
Climate Change
Campbell
: While David Parker is the Climate Change Minister,
you’re managing agriculture and forestry, two of the main
front end sectors. At the very least, why shouldn’t the
nitrous oxide contribution to farming’s emissions come
into the Emissions Trading Scheme earlier than 2013?
Anderton : Well, it might do. We’re working
on that. Even 2013, is a question mark. That’s our goal.
You’ve got to remember – no other country in the world
will include agriculture in the emissions trading system.
Agriculture is our most important economic driver, 50 % of
our emissions come from agriculture. So it’s a huge call
for us (a) to put it in and (b) to expect agriculture to
stump up with emissions reductions based already on 90 % of
the 2005 emissions. The clock is ticking already.
Campbell : The counter argument is that
dairying at least will never be in a better position to pay
for its own pollution.
Anderton : That’s
a bit fortuitous, to be honest. Dairy prices have doubled in
the last 12 months, while planning for climate change has
been under way ever since I came to this building. And the
drought, that no one predicted either, has had quite a
significant effect. As I said, putting agriculture [into the
ETS] was a hard call, but without it, 50 % of our emissions
would have had to be met by everyone else. That’s
demonstrably unfair.
Campbell : Right
okay, there are contrary forces. But assuming we can’t
hit farmers for their methane until we find some alternative
way of dealing with it, is it your belief regardless that at
least part of farming’s share should be in the ETS before
2013?
Anderton : In one sense,
agriculture is in now. This business of being benchmarked
against 90 % of the emissions in 2005 is a very real
matter. If agriculture doesn’t take steps between now and
2013, then on January 1st 2013 there will be all these
liabilities. Its disingenuous to think that will happen.
You would be right to think the government is working assiduously with agriculture – and with the dairy industry in particular. And you’re right, that’s partly because they’re in as good a position now as they’re likely to be, to try and do something about it.
So yes, we are
talking with Fonterra and other dairy industry
representatives to see how we can take some mitigating
actions between now and 2013 to (a) increase our knowledge
and research capabilities and (b) to pilot schemes that
would give us some idea of where we can use effective
mitigation measures, and how effective they are.
Campbell : Such as nitrogen inhibitors ?
Reportedly, they have their limitations in hill country
conditions…
Anderton : Yes, and
that’s the problem. You can’t just say, everyone should
use nitrogen inhibitors.
Campbell : Some
older people in Wigram would still be carrying the flow-on
effects of saving the planet last time round, from Nazism.
Are you willing to let them bear the extra costs that the
ETS will impose, unaided ?
Anderton : No.
The climate change issue and the extra costs that will
almost certainly fall on the energy sector - and therefore
on consumers – have to be mitigated to some extent. You
can’t ask an elderly person on a fixed income to meet
costs they can’t possibly meet. Anymore than we can ask
farmers to do something [about methane] that’s currently
impossible to do.
So I’ve encouraged the government
to look at dealing with those issues through some of the
windfall profits that will come as a result of the
government owning energy companies. Extra charges will fall
[under the ETS] on people, who will have to pay more. It may
well be, if the forecasts are correct, that some of these
companies will make extra profits, and those extra profits
should go back to helping the people most in need. That
policy will be enunciated over time…
I’ve taken
the view around the Cabinet table that if you want the
support of your colleagues, you don’t want to turn up
every morning and beat them around the head with a piece of
four by two….The Alliance always wanted me to force a
Cabinet vote on Kiwibank. I’d say what is it about 16 to 4
that you don’t understand? There are 16 Cabinet Ministers
who don’t want the bloody bank, and four of us who do. So
the last thing I want is a vote. I wanted the Cabinet to
agree to have the bank.
Campbell : The
reason I’m laughing is that this is so different from the
brow beating, table pounding Anderton that people will
recall very clearly
Anderton : You have
different roles. In those days, that was an important
persona to have : to be resolute and not take a step back,
and all the rest of it. But then if you get into a situation
where co-operation rather than confrontation is the way you
can move things forward for the people you represent
then…I mean, if you claim to represent people, you better
go try and deliver for them.
Campbell : Under the ETS proposed last week by the Garnaut Report, the Australians are, proposing to divert about half the revenues into helping low income families cope with the extra energy costs, about a third to trade-vulnerable firms to help them adapt, and about a fifth towards research. Wouldn’t there have been wider public support for our ETS, if we’d announced steps in mitigation right at the outset?
Anderton : The problem is, as I
said earlier, is that 50 % of our emissions come from
agriculture. That’s a profile no other country has. And
they’re not in a position to easily reduce those
emissions, at the present time. We’ve got a big problem,
and the rest of the community has to take a fair burden. If
we clobbered that agriculture sector, which earns about 65 %
of our overseas exchange earnings unreasonably, then we’d
be cutting our throats.
Campbell : Right, understood. That wasn’t my question. The Australians suggest frontloading their ETS with mitigation promises and mechanisms, and surely, it would have been a good idea for us to have done the same, rather than being in denial about the costs.
Anderton : I’ll hold fire on
that a bit until I see what the Australians actually do.
Over the years I’ve watched a lot of announcements from
Australia…the truth is, we’ve been pioneering this stuff
[on the ETS] for quite a long time. And the Australians have
come to us, for help and advice on their system. Because
we’re way ahead of them.
Campbell : Are you saying we’ve been their pilot scheme?
Anderton : By accident. They said
they wouldn’t be in it. Now they’ve got another
government that says yes, we are. But they’ve got a lot of
catching up to do.
[ Yesterday, the Rudd
government officially proposed to phase in their ETS by
2010, to keep agriculture out of it until 2015, to cut fuel
taxes to mitigate transport costs ( meaning : their ETS will
have less impact on petrol/diesel driven emissions) and to
parcel out ratios of free allocations to affected (and
polluting) industries that will make their system weaker
than ours, but the bulk of it will be starting earlier.
There will be barriers to us trading our units on their
market. Hat tip to No Right Turn for some of these details.]
Campbell : What’s been behind those recent rates of de-forestation? To what extent has that been due to the conversion to dairying?
Anderton : There are…about four factors involved. In the 90s, the National party incentivised forestry planting. They gave tax breaks for it. If you go round NZ and see where people planted them, there’s some amazing places, really. You can look up some sheer cliff face, and there’s bloody trees all over it. And you think – how the hell are they going to harvest those? And at what cost?
So we had
incentivised it, and they planted them everywhere. I’ve
got forests now that people owned and they say well, there
are no roads ( laughs) And they say, would you like to build
one? And we have had to build roads into forests on the
East Coast and in Northland, where there were no bloody
roads. So, we picked up the tab for making it possible to
harvest them. Sothere’s a price to be paid for just
planting trees everywhere. That’s the first thing. When
the incentives finished, that sort of planting stopped.
The second thing is, the wood industry has gone
through a down cycle, with prices. Its recovering from that,
a bit like the milk industry. The wood industry and a lot of
the food industries are going through a boom at the moment.
There are shortages of high quality wood, and food. Prices
are rising. So ironically, at that very time – and it
happens just after you’ve pulled out all the grapes, or
all the avocadoes, or the kiwifruit or whatever the flavour
of the month happens to be - suddenly, all the prices go
up. So people go oh God, we better start planting again.
That was the second thing, the price cycle.
The third thing is that when the trees were planted – and take the central North Island for an example – that land wasn’t very good for farming. It had cobalt deficiencies, and all the rest of it. We’ve been able to fix that. If only we’d had that capability back then – because it was ideal land for farming, and not necessarily that good for forestry. But trees were the only option at the time. When you look at it now, its rolling country and you’d say, that’s great dairying country. So when the price for dairy goes shooting up and the price of trees was shooting down it was a bit of a no brainer.
Add one further thing : we gave them five years notice. And said that on January 1st 2008 , any de-forestation of trees that were planted before 1990…. well, you’re going to be liable for the emissions, but up until then, you can de-forest. So people -
Campbell : Just fired up their chain
saws ?
Anderton : Right. The point is,
de-forestation is not due to a single thing. Its been all of
the above.
Campbell : In this country,
its usually been the state rather than the private sector
that has driven r&d investment – formerly under the DSIR,
now under the Fast Forward scheme. Do you find it annoying
that the private sector will bemoan the state’s
inefficiency, while consistently riding on its
coat-tails?
Anderton : (laughs) What do you
think ? I’ve just heard these companies saying that gee,
we’ll do better under a National government. I would say
that the last eight years until now. have been the best
years to be in business in New Zealand that I know of. I
started in business in 1971. We had some rough times - oil
shocks, carless days, Muldoon Think Big stuff and then the
business collapses, the rising unemployment…
By
contrast, I said to one company executive only a couple of
years ago : look, if I couldn’t make money now, I’d
bloody shoot myself. You’d have to be pretty bloody stupid
not to have had a good business during the recent
conditions. Everything was going : high growth, all sorts of
assistance, and incentives from government. All the years
that I was in opposition and anyone came to me and asked if
government would help with this or that, I’d say no –
they can’t, and they won’t. There was no help.
Now, we’ve got Industry NZ, NZ Trade and Enterprise, sustainable farming funds …And I think to myself sometimes - you ungrateful bastards ! But again, that’s political reality. When we gave Fast Forward to farmers, we didn’t think they’d go: gee, this is a great government, we should vote them back into power.
Bassett, the 1980s and now
Campbell : Have you read Michael Bassett’s book on David Lange?
Anderton : I’ve been tossing up
whether I would or not.
Campbell : Next to
Margaret Pope, you’re probably the chief villain of the
story. Are you comfortable with being depicted as the last
baron of Fortress New Zealand ?
Anderton :
The funny thing is that people think because Bassett took
notes at caucus that therefore it must be right. But he took
the notes, and he took them from his perspective. So of
course, everyone else is a villain. (laughs) Is that an
accolade, for a historian ? Or is it a sign of someone who
had a vested interest in telling us his particular side of
the story?
The other side of the story could be…
that thank goodness, there was someone there who said : Hey
listen fellers, don’t you realize going into the next
election you’ve upset all the students of New Zealand by
introducing the concept of student debt, you’ve upset all
the oldies with the way you’ve punched them around,
you’ve buggered up the health system by beginning to
charge people for it – so who do you think is going to
vote for you next time ? But they didn’t like that.
Campbell : I’d like to pick up one thing
in the book – the coup attempt against Rowling in December
1980, that Bassett somewhat slides over
-
Anderton : I bet he does.
Campbell : Partly as a result of the
subsequent turmoil, Labour very narrowly lost the 1981
election. There’s an alternative history whereby without
it, Rowling wins the 1981 election, Roger Douglas retires to
run his Red Seal family business, Rogernomics never happens,
and you succeed Rowling as PM. Doesn’t that make the coup
attempt a fairly key moment in NZ’s political history
?
Anderton : From that perspective, it
was. Because it ruined Bill’s chances. We were on
something of a roll, actually. There had a been a coup
attempt against Muldoon the week before. The week before !
A coup against the PM, by his own party. We had a leader
who’s been PM before, who had led the party since the mid
1970s. Yeah, we were on a roll.
Campbell :
That being the case, do you think the coup plotters
actually wanted to lose the 1981 election?
Anderton : Yes. That’s true, I’m sure
that’s true. Whether that was at the front of their minds
or not, I’m sure they thought they would rather lose than
go through with this. It was a very kamikaze -
Campbell : As the 70 year old Jim Anderton
looks back, do you still think New Zealand would be better
off if Rogernomics had never happened?
Anderton : Yes, I do. Just as Australia was
better off because – and given that are different
constructions on the economy – they took a more moderate
view. They did change, but in a managed way. I was never
against change. But I was against sacrificing hundreds of
thousands of people without any plan of what the hell you
were going to do with them.
Campbell :
OK, you weren’t against change… So, do you now think the
devaluation and currency float in 1985 were necessary –
even desirable ?
Anderton : You had to
have a plan about how to deal with the outcomes. They
didn’t have one. The plan was to do it fast enough so that
people didn’t realize what was happening to them… You
remember David Lange’s famous reply when asked why he
didn’t tell people what he had in mind and he said –
‘Because they wouldn’t have liked it!’
Campbell : So you’re saying that the Rogernomics process was a bit like the invasion of Iraq – in the sense there was no exit strategy, electorally?
Anderton : That’s right. There was no exit
strategy. The exit strategy for Hastings….I remember being
told on the Thursday night that on the Friday afternoon,
Whaketu [freezing works] was going to be closed. They were
going to be told at 3 o’clock. And I remember asking –
what was going to happen? What were we going to do? Because
at that time, there was a lot of unemployment.
There
were 2,000 workers. That means about 10,000 people in total,
affected. And the answer was – we are sending up a Social
Welfare team to counsel people who were threatening suicide.
(laughs) Yeah that’s great, that’ll work ! ….I mean,
we were dealing with peoples’ lives. What is the cost that
Bassett puts on the people who committed suicide during that
time ? The farmers, who killed themselves. We were
subsidising farmers with 3 % loans. They went to 30 %
virtually overnight. We de-capitalised their land. It fell
in value by half, or more. So they were committed to loans
that they couldn’t even service.
You’d think that
anyone with half a brain would see that. Yet what Douglas
said was, that’s inevitable, we have to do it. There was
no transition for it, no plan. With climate change, we’ve
said to people – five years ahead ! If you want to chop
down the trees, chop them down now, by the 1st of January.
We took that hit, and we have been criticized by the
National Party for doing it. But that was the transition
cost. Where was the transition plan [in the 1980s] for all
of what was done ?
Campbell : As I
implied before with the question about the 1985 devaluation
and float, times change. You’ve changed. Let me quote from
your speech to the FAO last month, when you say : ‘ You
won’t find a farmer in NZ who would go back to the days of
tariffs and subsidies of the past. Reform spurred
significant innovation and productivity gains, which means
we produce m ore foods than ever before.” That is exactly
the argument that the Bassetts of the world put forward now,
to justify the steps taken.
Anderton : As I said to you, I was never against change. If you actually go back to see my speeches at the time I said that SMPs ( supplementary minimum prices} were family benefits for sheep. This was ridiculous. We were subsidising our core industry –
Campbell : But SMPs were a
facet of Muldoonism. I’m talking about your stance –
then and now, towards free market economics. Let me cite one
of your speeches from April 1984 to the Auckland Regional
Conference : ‘Anyone who believes that NZ should become
the free market of the world for other nations to use as a
dump basket for cheap, subsidized marginally costed and low
wage-produced goods is asking New Zealand to adopt a recipe
for social and economic disaster.’ Yet today, I assume
you support the China FTA?
Anderton : The
two things are connected. I was saying we were wrong to
subsidise production that we couldn’t sell. We had 80
million sheep. We’ve now got 40 million, and we make more
out of the 40 million…I had the Iranian ambassador in here
last year saying Mr Anderton, when are we going to get back
to supplying Iran with frozen sheep carcasses at $2:50 each?
I said. ‘Never.”
That’s the first thing. Don’t
forget : we weren’t paying those subsidies from income we
had, we were borrowing money to do it, which made it even
worse. That made us more vulnerable. The other wise of the
coin was – if you want to compete with the rest of the
world and open your markets, you’ve got to do some thing
actively to prepare for that. And you’ve got to build the
capacity to do it. But what [the Rogernomes ] were saying to
the rest of the world was – we will open our markets to
the rest of the world for you, and we don’t care if you
open up for us at all. Just come in. And that’s exactly
what we did.
We dropped all the tariff barriers. As a
result, we go into negotiations now on free trade
agreements, and when countries say to us ‘ What are you
going to do for us?’ we have to say in reply: ’ Nothing.
Because we’ve already done it. We don’t have anything to
offer.’ Basically, we gave away all of our bargaining
chips, and said “Come in here, and we’ll give you a
license to kill.’ I thought it was ridiculous then, and I
still think it is ridiculous.
Campbell :
Do you think you could have done more to forge and hold
together an effective bloc of opposition to Rogernomics
within caucus ?
Anderton : No. I tried…I
always remember the initial core vote against Rogernomics
was sixteen. That was the core group we had at the time who
were prepared to vote against it. I worked with that
sixteen, and watched it whittle down.
Campbell
: And people still claim that was partly your
fault. Is there any inkling of truth to the criticism that
you feel the need to control any organization to which you
belong?
Anderton : No, I don’t think
so. I mean…inkling of truth, who knows? I wouldn’t want
to go that far. This is what happened. Reg Boorman was one
of those sixteen, the MP for Wairarapa. He had a majority of
one…. He wanted a gas pipeline to the Wairarapa.
Basically, he was told - drop your support for Anderton,
drop all that nonsense and you’ll get your gas pipeline.
There were people who depended on the support of the
Engineers Union. Building frigates and everything was part
of the deal. When it came to the conference in Dunedin. that
was what swung it. They were promised they would get jobs
out of building frigates, if they changed their vote. It
wasn’t warm and cuddly stuff. It was cut-throat, real
machine politics…we were saying things they didn’t want
to hear. In the end they paid a high price for it. But there
we are.
Campbell : You’ve recently come
out in favour of anti-siphoning laws, to ensure major sports
events are on free to air coverage. Isn’t that really
water under the bridge?
Anderton : It
is a bit. But I talk to film industry people who say how
important it is to see ourselves on film, to picture
ourselves and understand who we are and that film helps us
do that and dah de dah. And I agree with all of that. But
the point is, the same thing applies with respect to our
culture, when it comes to live sport. People disagree with
this, but I think we have to accept that rugby is part of
who we are.
Whatever it was that shaped us as New
Zealanders, rugby is part of it. And I see people
saying…there’s only half the audience there used to be,
so its not as popular. Well of course its not – because
you have to pay $85-90 bucks a month to have Sky TV. A lot
of families can’t afford it. Those kids will miss out. And
the people who say, who cares – its only rugby, only
netball or cricket. Well, its an elitism that says we’ll
spend money on Te Papa or on a museum, or an art gallery or
on New Zealand film, but we can’t spend it on sport. I
happen to think sport is part of us.
Campbell
: One last point, on sport : In an era before
helmets, you played competitive cricket against Gary
Bartlett, one of the fastest and most unpredictable bowlers
New Zealand has ever produced. When you looked at Shane
Bond, did Bartlett seem in the same
league?
Anderton : Oh yes. I’ve spoken
to a lot of cricketers over the years and any of them who
ever saw Bartlett – and certainly any who ever faced him
– think he is the fastest bowler that we’ve ever had.
I’ve played senior and representative cricket, and opened
the batting all over the place. The first ball that I faced
from Gary Bartlett, I never saw it. I didn’t think he’d
actually bowled it. I saw his arm come over, and then the
next thing the wicketkeeper had it. (laughs) It was the
first time in my life that I felt real fear.
ENDS