BY SUE BOLTON
On April 3, New Zealand Alliance party leader and deputy prime minister Jim Anderton announced that he and Alliance deputy leader Sandra Lee would not stand under the Alliance banner in New Zealand's national elections, due in November this year.
On the same day, the Democratic Party (formerly known as the Social Credit Party) announced that it too would leave the Alliance.
The Alliance, formed in the 1980s by left critics of Labour's neo-liberal economic agenda, is today the junior partner in a coalition government with the Labour Party.
Anderton said that, in May, he will announce details of the new party he will form for the elections.
Although his new party doesn't yet have a name, Anderton says that it will be a voice for "employment, innovation and strong local communities". It is likely to be heavily dependent on the Democratic Party, which claims 1800 financial members.
Anderton's announcement has resulted in a cold split among the Alliance MPs. Six of the 10 Alliance MPs have thrown their lot in with Anderton, leaving only three who remain loyal to the Alliance — Laila Harre, Willie Jackson and Liz Gordon.
Another Alliance MP, Kevin Campbell, has stated he will continue to support Anderton for the remainder of this parliament, but does not envisage joining a new party.
In a move that is sure to deepen public cynicism about parliamentary politics, Anderton has announced that he will not actually resign from the Alliance until just before the next election, and that he will remain Alliance leader in parliament. This is despite the fact that he will use the next few months to prepare a new party.
By delaying the formal split until the election, Anderton has exploited a loophole in the Electoral (Integrity) Amendment Act, which was originally promoted by Anderton to stop MPs switching parties after they had been elected. If Anderton and his fellow MPs formally resigned from the Alliance now, they would be legally required to resign from parliament.
Another reason for the Anderton grouping maintaining the fiction of being Alliance MPs is that it will preserve their access to the Alliance's funding, speaking rights in parliament and select committee representation. The Alliance receives NZ$848,000 a year for staff, research and other support for MPs.
A deal has now been worked out between the two factions of Alliance MPs on how to co-exist in parliament until the election.
The Anderton and Harre factions have agreed to split the Alliance's parliamentary funding 60/40. Harre has agreed not to publicly lay claim to the parliamentary leadership of the Alliance or legally challenge Anderton's leadership. Speaking rights would be dealt with issue by issue, and each faction will caucus separately.
On April 3, Labour Prime Minister Helen Clark told the Dominion that the Alliance split was unlikely to affect the stability of the government "because the two sides to the dispute continue to profess their desire to be in coalition with Labour".
For Anderton, the split came about because he rejected the criticism of many Alliance members who wanted the Alliance to differentiate itself more strongly from Labour.
Harre expressed an identical view in the April 3 Dominion when she said: "I am particularly proud of the record of the Alliance as part of the coalition and am concerned that Jim Anderton's decision will compromise our effectiveness in government. The least I expect is co-operation to ensure the ongoing stability of the government."
In the months leading up to the announcement of the split, Anderton and his loyal coterie of MPs have been involved in a war with the majority of the non-parliamentary leaders of the Alliance.
First, there was the Alliance national conference in November 2001, where for the first time, delegates bucked Anderton's authority by raising questions about the Alliance's uncritical attitude to Labour while in coalition government, and were furious at the Alliance MPs for voting to send SAS troops to Afghanistan. Anderton had pretty much dominated previous conferences.
After the conference, Anderton took his revenge against the delegates' insubordination. He put pressure on Alliance president Matt McCarten to resign, locked out all left-wing Alliance staffers and pressured all but three of the MPs to stop contributing a 10% tithe of their parliamentary salary to the Alliance.
Then, in mid-March, Anderton and Alliance deputy leader Sandra Lee sent 3730 letters to Alliance members asking them to tick one of two boxes: 1. Stay on course as "common-sense constructive coalition partners, working for Alliance values and policies"; or, 2. Head off on an alternative course of opposition policies.
In response to the Anderton/Lee letter to members, Harre told the March 20 New Zealand Herald:"There is no disagreement over fundamental strategy. All members of the Alliance who I have spoken to want us to go forward as a united party, under our current leadership, into an election campaign aimed at reforming a Labour-Alliance coalition government. I will be ticking the top box. I will not be supporting a split in the Alliance." McCarten also confirmed that he would be ticking the top box, along with Anderton and Lee.
Despite both factions of the Alliance declaring that they supported "option one" on the Anderton/Lee letter, 8% of the 2121 members who responded said that the party should do more to push Alliance views and another 8% indicated that Anderton had lost their support.
Anderton then provocatively proposed that the Alliance constitution be set aside and that the 30-member national council resign to be replaced by a committee of seven which would include a majority of MPs. This proposal was predictably rejected by the April 2 meeting of the national council.
So, what is the ordinary Alliance member or member of the public to make of the split? Anderton says there is a difference over whether or not the Alliance should participate collaboratively in a coalition government with the Labour Party. Harre and McCarten deny that there is any difference over this issue.
If both factions support being in coalition with Labour, what are the issues at the root of the split?
At the Alliance national conference in November, many Alliance activists expressed unhappiness with the coalition government. Many felt that the Alliance didn't differentiate itself enough from Labour, despite the right to differentiate being part of the coalition agreement. As a result of this, the Alliance had lost members and many voters to the Green Party. Many Alliance members and voters feel that Anderton has been acting more and more like a Labour Party minister rather than an Alliance member.
If these dissatisfactions were being raised by many activists at the Alliance national conference, it seems strange that the left leadership of the Alliance, which is publicly represented by McCarten and Harre, continues to deny any differences with the Anderton wing.
If the left clearly articulated an alternative perspective to Anderton, the Alliance would stand a good chance of winning back members and voters who have deserted it for the Greens. The Green Party is now the third most popular party, according to the National Business Review-Compaq poll (reported in the April 12 Dominion) conducted by UMR Research on April 4-8. This poll found the Green Party's support had increased from 5.4% to 6.1%.
The same poll found that Labour's support had increased from 48% in March to 53%. Only 1.6% said that they would vote for the Alliance without picking an individual faction, and a further 0.9% would vote for an Anderton party, 0.1% for a Laila Harre party and 0.2% for Mana Motuhake (a Maori party which was one of the founding parties of the Alliance).
From Green Left Weekly, April 24, 2002.
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