Labour left him, now he’s left us

Over the holiday break, the death of Jim Anderton was the most significant political event.

During the 1980s, Anderton had mounted a principled resistance to the embrace of Thatcherism by the fourth Labour government, which had chosen to imbue market forces with almost magical powers. In the end, even Helen Clark famously professed she hadn’t come this far to go down in a hail of bullets with Jim Anderton. In 1989, Anderton’s reaction to Labour’s decision to sell the BNZ finally saw him suspended from caucus.

At the time, Tom Scott drew a terrific cartoon showing Anderton being expelled from a narrow group around the campfire, to join a huge number of ordinary New Zealanders waiting beyond. As Anderton put it: ‘‘I didn’t leave the Labour Party, the Labour Party left me.’’

Later, he founded New Labour, and the Alliance, before rejoining Labour. His founding of Kiwibank was an ironic crowning success, given his banishment over the BNZ sale.

What motivated him? Arguably, there’s a strand of Catholic activism in the Labour tradition that’s traceable right back to Michael Joseph Savage. Anderton had learned that tradition early, the hard way. Born James Byrne, he and his mother Joyce were abandoned by Jim’s biological father. After Joyce remarried, Victor Anderton formally adopted the boy, who took his surname.

Given the hours involved, parenting and politics are often not a happy mix. Moreover, one of life’s blacker jokes is that the most loving things done by parents leave no trace in their children’s memory banks. Anderton was no exception.

‘‘I was the great Irish father in a sense,’’ Anderton once told me ruefully, ‘‘terrific with the kids until they developed a mind and personality of their own.

‘‘While I was their hero, and everything I said was gospel, everything was fine. Then I had these alien creatures – teenagers – who suddenly said: ‘You’re the worst father in the world.’ I didn’t handle it.

‘‘One after another, all these lovely kids who had been my closest companions, who thought I was God’’ – he laughed – ‘‘turned on me.’’

If Catholic radicalism had fuelled Anderton’s public life, a fair amount of Catholic guilt stayed with him over his felt failings as a parent, and over the contribution his political career made to the failure of his first marriage. After his daughter Philippa died in the early 1990s, Anderton briefly resigned from politics.

The guilt, he said to me, can be put to rest.

‘‘But I think the answer is you never really let go. Because you’re saying to me: do you ever get to the point where you can forget that you had a daughter? No. Can you ever forget that she committed suicide? No. Will you ever forget some of the heartbreak and trauma? No. But can you get on with your life? Yes.

‘‘The fact is not so much that you remember but… how do you live? Do you let yourself go into depression? Or do you try to remember, constructively?’’

Anderton’s re-entry to politics proved to be entirely constructive. Under the Clark government you could say Labour had returned, back to where Jim Anderton had been all along.