So, becoming reacquainted with it was an exhilarating experience.
It is sobering to recall that 60 years ago democracy’s wisdom and magic was everywhere you looked. New Zealanders used to be inveterate formers and joiners of committees.
Arguing the point was a national pastime. Significantly, New Zealand’s political parties were huge — among the largest in the world when set against the country’s tiny population.
Democracy wasn’t just a theory in "God’s Own Country", it was a practice.
One cannot, of course, practise democracy without talking. Learning how to communicate effectively with other people is the key to political success.
Professionals of all kinds, especially teachers and lawyers, have always been good talkers.
However, back in the 1950s and ’60s one did not have to possess a degree or a diploma to manifest the gift of the gab. New Zealand’s large trade union movement was rightly celebrated for its "shed oratory".
Nowhere were these shed orators more in evidence than in the nation’s freezing works.
If you could persuade scores of working-class blokes carrying razor-sharp knives and wearing blood-spattered aprons to back your ideas, then you could persuade just about anybody!
Oratory, be it professional or proletarian, was the stock-in-trade of the big party conferences. This was principally because both Labour and National were proudly democratic political institutions.
Policy rose from the bottom to the top because, as mass parties, it wasn’t really feasible for policy to be formed in any other fashion. Power lay with party members to a degree that today’s politicians would consider downright dangerous.
That Labour could not be electorally effective as anything other than a mass membership party was widely understood. By the time it entered office in 1935 it boasted a membership upwards of 50,000 — dwarfing its electoral rivals.
What is remarkable about the 1936 formation of Labour’s great challenger, the New Zealand National Party, is that its elite founders grasped a vital constitutional point that their predecessors would probably have missed.
The new party of the Right could not hope to compete with Labour unless it, too, was a mass membership party. They also understood that in such a party the selection of candidates and the formation of policy had to be the prerogative of its members — not a bunch of unelected and unaccountable grandees.
Thus it was, that when the big parties gathered for their annual conferences, the people of New Zealand were able, through the reporting of the press, and later radio and television, to witness the spectacle of democracy in action.
Policy "remits" were debated passionately and at length, exposing — precisely because these were mass parties — the fault lines that ran through the nation as a whole.
In a sense that is now almost entirely absent, these gatherings belonged as much to the voters as they did to the parties’ members. The two major parties constituted the crucial building blocks of New Zealand’s political system.
Although, legally-speaking, Labour and National were private organisations, their crucial public role imposed upon both parties a strong measure of openness and accountability.
How different everything is today. The mass membership parties of yesteryear were long ago laid waste by the neoliberal revolution, replaced by what the political scientists call "cadre" parties.
Tightly organised and carefully managed, the central purpose of these much smaller entities is to provide ideological and logistical back-up to their parliamentary leaders. In today’s Labour and National, democracy just gets in the way.
But not in New Zealand First. Composed of refugees from both major parties, the NZ Firsters still cling to the idea that a political organisation seeking the support of its fellow citizens should make every effort to keep its proceedings open to the public.
They still take it as read that party policy is theirs to make, and that if democracy is to be done, then it must be seen to be done.
Watching it being done as an invited speaker last weekend, I was reminded of the party conferences I had attended as a member, or covered as a political writer, back in the 1980s and ’90s.
The same magic was in evidence; the same alchemical distillation of collective wisdom; the same public demonstration of democracy’s two indispensable components: free speech and open debate.
■ Chris Trotter is an Auckland writer and commentator.
