Believer - Conversations with Mike Moore by Parussini Peter

Author:Parussini, Peter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Upstart Press
Published: 2020-10-14T16:00:00+00:00

8

Young horses

‘Jim Bolger, he had some abilities. He would always stick to his notes. I could hit him with a concrete block and he’d stick to his message all the time. We went after him over his broken promises and he’d just say over and over: “The BNZ, the BNZ.” I may have thought he was useless, but he still beat us.

‘I knew they’d come after me after the election. The only way to keep them at bay was to have the opinion polls — the people — with me. And we worked our guts out.

‘Before the 1990 election defeat we mapped out a strategy to get back in 1993. We created a Labour Listens campaign to go around the country and re-engage with our people and let them vent. We got this smart young MP Steve Maharey, who I thought could be a possible future leader, to front it.

‘We also got researchers to work out all the promises made by National Party candidates in their local newspapers.

‘I was always worried that Bolger would call a special conference of the National Party to say he couldn’t keep his promises. That would have stuffed us. He might have lost some seats, but he would have been fine. But he didn’t have the nerve or the skill to do it.

‘So, every day we would hang him on his broken promises.

‘In the first few months we got the inexperienced ministers to say things which we hoped would hang them later on.

‘I also got around the country and did a ton of radio shows each week, not just National Radio interviews, but all the music and light-hearted stuff. No one did that in those days.

‘I didn’t feel any animosity towards the fourth Labour Government, not me anyway. The animosity came from some party members. Labour rewards those who scab to the left but never forgets those who scab to the right.

‘They labelled me a right winger — what does that mean? Everything I’ve ever written, spoken about and fought for has been about the poor and those without.

‘I’m not prepared to say even now that what the fourth Labour Government did was wrong. We shouldn’t expunge that from our history.

‘We held caucuses outside of Wellington which was new back then. At regional conferences we’d try to do canvassing in the morning and then have our meetings in the afternoon. We had to get out and be seen, to hold our heads high.

‘In the House it was like the Greeks against the Persian hordes. You can only fight one at a time as they come through the pass so we weren’t worried that we were heavily outnumbered.

‘For three years we were heads down and arses up. We had a great team. Helen wanted Trevor Mallard in the office and Heather Simpson came across too. They were good.

‘Some of the new MPs were very talented and because we were such a small caucus they got elevated quickly. Some of them had a great sense of humour which helped relieve the pressure on a small Opposition.

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