Anderton’s politics of principle

New Zealand was the Kampuchea of free market ideology back in the 1980s, economist Bruce Jesson wrote in his book on the period, Only Their Purpose is Mad. Our very own advocates of the more-market New Right agenda — championed elsewhere by Thatcher, Reagan and Pinochet — made 1984 their Year Zero and applied neoliberalism’s prescriptions here with the zeal of the Khmer Rouge. Jesson runs through this country’s principal proponents — the Treasury officials, the business lobbyists, the politicians — without naming our New Right Pol Pot. He is ultimately more interested in the ideas than their champions. It is perhaps easier, anyway, to identify the agenda’s most vocal opponents, as they weren’t as numerous at that time as might have been expected. “It was not a good career move to join the opposition,” Jesson notes. So, many of the likely candidates from the political classes were notably quiet. An exception was former Labour Party president and MP Jim Anderton, who was not about to bite his tongue. So, decades later, when it looked like he was not much longer for this world, film-maker Gerd Pohlmann, and others, decided his experience of that remarkable time shouldn’t pass with him. After all, Anderton had occupied a unique vantage point from which to witness the radical rollout of “Rogernomics”, from both inside and outside the fourth Labour government, and the “Ruthanasia” years that followed. With that in mind, in 2017, he sat down in front of a camera for a series of hours-long interviews. It was, at that time, principally an oral history project, but the potential to make something more of it was also apparent to Pohlmann. In the event, he took up that challenge and the result is now screening in the Whānau Mārama New Zealand International Film Festival. His documentary, Last Man Standing, retells the country’s experience of neoliberalism, the triumph of the market, from Anderton’s perspective. It’s Pohlmann’s film, he’s director, but Middlemarch-based film-maker Shane Loader also spent countless hours — months, years — on the project as editor, working in his home studio to give shape to an ever expanding cast of characters in the final cut. Those original oral history interviews with Anderton provided the framework for the documentary, Loader says, but in order to build a film around them, they needed to both interview some of those who worked with him and track down footage from the years in question. The latter was not as easy as you might think. “We got lots of material from different sources, because I could see that the interview in itself wasn’t strong enough to make a film,” Loader says. Anderton was in many ways a very private person, so there weren’t going to be the personal stories that might otherwise have carried the narrative. “So, I knew it had to be done with archival material, and just finding that material was difficult.” NZIFFJim Anderton addresses a Labour Party conference in 'Last Man Standing'. Photo: NZIFF But tenacity pays dividends, and over time they began to turn up the footage they needed — on VHS tapes squirrelled away by various people, in archives and elsewhere. “It’s amazing what you can sometimes find on the internet.” Loader had also worked as editor on earlier documentaries covering some of the same territory, Someone Else’s Country and In a Land of Plenty, the films by Alister Barry. However, the cards didn’t all fall for the film-makers. During the period in question, Anderton’s years in politics, news organisations had shifted to video tape, and video tape can be taped over. “In a strange irony, the further you go back, the more likely it is you are going to find the material,” Loader says. “When they were shooting on film, they kept it. “But when they moved into videotape, there was a lot of taping over.” Other archival material had been lost in the Christchurch earthquakes. It meant that when they found those home recordings, in people’s dusty private collections, it wasn’t always possible to then turn up the original tape in an official archive somewhere. Sometimes, that dusty old tape, with its VHS-patina imprimatur of ’80s authenticity, had to do. “Some of it’s not that great quality,” Loader concedes. “But it’s all that exists.” The supporting cast of interviewees are mostly drawn from those close to Anderton. Fellow Alliance MPs Mat Robson and Sandra Lee feature prominently, and various of Anderton’s advisers and electorate supporters make an appearance. “I mean, it’s very much an insider story of Jim,” Loader says. Indeed, Robson is one of the film’s producers, alongside Barry. “So, it is a partisan story, but that’s OK. I think that’s obvious.” The point is that there’s no understanding where the country is now, without an appreciation for the politics of that time, he says. “And if we can’t understand where we are now, we won’t know where we’re going to go in the future. So, I think it’s really important that this time in our history is revisited.” Many of the enduring assumptions underlying New Zealand’s politics and economics were established during that time, so if you were born after 1980, it is all you’ve known, he says. But what have come to be regarded as intractable features of New Zealand society have not always been with us, neither the unemployment nor the homelessness. “There weren’t homeless people living in the streets, living in cars like there are now. “And what I find most scary is that that environment of neoliberalism, it created the conditions for the rise of people like Trump, because of the deprivation that has happened. So, I would argue, it’s the forerunner to, potentially, a fascist society. We’re not there yet in this country, but we could go there.” While the film focuses on the years after the election of the Lange-Douglas Labour government in 1984, Anderton’s life provides a useful framing for a longer-run look at the country’s political history. Anderton was born into a poor Auckland working class family in 1938, the same year the Savage Labour government passed its Social Security Act, which established New Zealand as a welfare state — explicitly setting out to end poverty. “Jim and his success is a product of that welfare state — and he’s very clear about that,” Loader observes. Much of Loader’s editing work was completed during the Covid-19 years, in what he describes as “quite a long process”. “It’s a bit like whittling a piece of wood, you know. You start with this log and then you just whittle and whittle and whittle away until you get something that works. So, I suppose editing something of that size, we just started with scenes.” Many of those scenes chose themselves — Anderton taking a stand at party conferences, being ostracised by the Labour Party caucus, the setting up of the New Labour Party and the Alliance. Each could be edited into it’s own vignette to be sequenced later. “I’m not thinking how they’re going to stick together at that point. And then it’s a matter of suddenly you end up with this five-hour, six-hour film, you know, and you go, ‘OK, that’s a bit long’. And a lot of stuff got dropped, a lot of stuff that Jim did.” For example, Anderton’s efforts as associate health minister in the Clark government to improve mental health services didn’t make the final cut. “He worked a lot on that. And there was a scene of that in the film. But in the end, we just had to go, ‘it’s already two hours, this film. We can’t make it any longer. We have to drop things’. “So, that was one of the ones that went.” The time it took to pull the movie together made some of those decisions easier. “Sometimes a film of this size needs to take that time because you need to have time away from it to get a new perspective on it,” Loader says. “You’ll take some months off and then I’ll come back and look at it and I’ll go, ‘oh, just get rid of that; oh, just get rid of that’. Because I couldn’t have done that, made those choices, had I not had that break.” On the other hand, the film’s long process also pushed it into dangerous territory, Loader says. “If a film doesn’t get done within a certain time, it often dies. And I really felt that there was a danger that this film was going to die.” And no-one was getting rich from the long hours of work on it. “We all realised that if it doesn’t come out this year, it will never come out. So, we worked our butts off over the last few months. It was absolutely insane. “I even had my computer melt down and die. Fortunately, I had it all backed up.” After all that, the timing of the release ultimately seems propitious, Loader says. “Yeah, because we still have a neoliberal government. They’re still rushing headlong down that road. “And, as I said, people just think, ‘well, that’s natural, that’s the way it is’. Especially younger people. And I’m saying, ‘well, no, it wasn’t for a long time’. ‘New Zealand wasn’t like that’. So, yeah, I’m hoping that maybe it will have more interest because it is an election year.” As far as this year’s contest of ideas goes, Last Man Standing demonstrates that the arguments haven’t changed very much. Speaking from behind his trademark moustache as finance minister, Roger Douglas, who later left Labour to establish the Act Party, makes the case for a return to prosperity via “competent economic management” focused on beating inflation, and talks of sunlit uplands where there will be no need for taxes. On the other side of the philosophical aisle, Anderton argues for a co-operative society where people plan together around shared values. Equity and co-operation are better goals than competition, he maintains. The dividend from the Douglas years, the gain that was promised for the pain, remains contentious. In his valedictory speech in Parliament, Anderton laid out the costs as he saw it, and who he thought had paid it. “The gap between rich and poor widened by 127% in 6 years — or 14% a year — between 1984 and 1990, and in my view New Zealand has never recovered from that enormous chasm,” he told the House. Outgoing Children’s Commissioner Dr Claire Achmad might have been addressing that very point, that chasm and those caught up in it, when writing recently about the hardships being experienced by the nation’s children. “Nearly 170,000 New Zealand children are living in material hardship and half of these children are in working families,” she wrote, noting it reflected the priorities and policies of the current government. Loader is familiar with the statistics, sees the threads that connect them back to the changes instituted in the 1980s and 1990s, and the judgment they carry. “When people say child poverty, well, that’s just poverty. Those children all have parents and they are poor too.” It’s a way of talking about the issue without offending people, he says. “But, you know, every child has a parent or guardian. And if the children are poor, that’s because their parents are poor or their guardian’s poor.” Jesson, who successfully road-tested the Anderton-led Alliance brand in Auckland local body politics in the early ’90s, argued in his book, writing as the ’90s came to a close, that an unregulated market would inevitably produce human misery. Loader points out that New Zealand now has 26 billionaires, according to the NBR’s rich list. There’s a school of thought now that each one of them represents a policy failure, in a world still beset by poverty. “We have greater wealth than we’ve ever had before, as well as that poverty,” Loader says. “The disparity of income and inequality that has happened over quite a short period of time just blows your mind, really.” Loader was struck by various things as he trawled through the decades again, splicing them back together for the film. He’d remembered Anderton as an outlier, but hadn’t realised quite how alone he was in holding his ground against the New Right tide. “They just deserted him,” he says of Anderton’s Labour colleagues. “They just forgot their former values.” Meanwhile, Anderton remained the social democrat he’d always been. “I didn’t always agree with him, but he was a man of his principles and he stuck by them.” The screenings • Last Man Standing screens as part of Whānau Mārama New Zealand International Film Festival. • Rialto, Tomorrow 3pm • Rialto, Monday 11am