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  AGENDA AUGUST 13 SIMON A former Labour Party President, Jim Anderton was first elected to parliament in 1984, he resigned from Labour in 1989 and set up the New Labour Party which later formed part of the Alliance. In 2002 he resigned from the Alliance to form what's now known as Jim Anderton's Progressives. The party launches its election campaign in Auckland tomorrow and Jim Anderton is with me now live from Christchurch. Welcome to the programme Mr Anderton. JIM Good morning Simon. SIMON You said on TV3's debate on Thursday night that your Progressive Party would only go into coalition with Labour, which begs the question of course why vote for you at all, why not simply vote Labour? JIM Well we bring to the cabinet table as we have in the last six years different perspectives. There would be no Kiwibank if there hadn’t been my presence around the cabinet table, there'd be no four weeks paid annual leave. There'd be no drive in the regional economic development areas and there'd be no push to get the drinking age moved back to 20 and so the elements of political policy and philosophy and perspective that we bring to the cabinet table are different and you wouldn’t be able to do those things from inside the Labour caucus, I know that full well from my experience. SIMON But you're polling so much lower than you were three years ago you know, you're down in the polls the party's withering why not simply fold back into Labour, couldn’t you be more effective that way now in recognising the realities of the situation? JIM Well our opportunity to campaign in a different way than you do when you're in a coalition government is at the general election campaign itself. When you say we're polling lower than three years ago, three years ago the party I then led the Alliance imploded, you can't get a worse start to the election campaign than losing the party you're leading and for six weeks of the campaign we had no television advertising, no radio advertising and we had to raise all our funds within that six weeks period so we're much better prepared this time, this election campaign can be good for us, I'm confident that we can get back at least Matt Robson and hopefully one or two others, that’s why the TV three debate to be honest was so important for parties like ours and Peter Dunne’s. SIMON But your personal profile is higher than the party's is that why you’ve put your own name on it? JIM That’s true, I mean basically one of the problems of coalition I think and one that neither major party Labour nor National have addressed adequately is how to nurture and uphold your coalition partner, I mean I read Labour Party literature for this election campaign for example and I hear that it was their Kiwibank, it was their four weeks paid leave, and it makes me laugh sometimes because they actually were opposed to them. SIMON You’re not getting traction on being able to publicise that though are you, they're able to claim it simply by marginalising you. JIM That’s right but if they're not careful these major parties, they actually crush their best friends and I just think that’s a learning curve, we haven’t had MMP for very long and there's still a tendency for the large parties to dominate and take credit for everything, it was interesting for example that Helen Clark was with Jeanette Fitzsimons yesterday in Auckland doing the roading bit, because Labour obviously are a bit worried that the Greens won't get up above the 5%. We could do with a little bit of nurturing like that too. SIMON Helen Clark didn’t invite you along? JIM No well I think there's a bit of taking for granted here you see, and the truth is philosophically there is no way that I could join with the National Party or the Act Party or even in a sense directly with New Zealand First, so we do only have one party we can join with that’s true. SIMON That means they take you for granted though doesn’t it? JIM Well it does a bit and they shouldn’t because it's a bit like you know your best friends you find out who they were when they're no longer around. SIMON You said you couldn’t join New Zealand First does that mean you couldn’t join the Labour government if they did partner with New Zealand First? JIM Well it would depend on what basis you know, I've been down this road with Winston Peters once before it was a nightmare. SIMON So you can still envisage a coalition with Winston Peters? JIM Well it's possible, anything's possible in politics, you couldn’t say never, but I wouldn’t sign up unless I knew what the agenda was, and with Winston you'd never know until about three months of haggling after the election if you're lucky. SIMON Your track record suggests that you have a propensity to leave parties, can you guarantee that you won't leave a party with your name on it? JIM Well don’t forget I was with the Labour Party for 26 years. SIMON And you left them twice. JIM I left it yes I did, and so did a hundred thousand other members of the Labour Party, I was about the last to leave. I mean the programme that Labour was running in 1990 I couldn’t sign up to that and nor could just about every other member of the Labour Party, they all left, we had a hundred thousand members reduced to five thousand. The Labour Party that’s in government now I wouldn’t have been leaving that in 1989 that’s true, but I did and the history of that is now there and you can't undo or unknown what you know or have done, so we're better to stake out our own ground, add a new perspective, I mean for example if you take the tax issues, I mean I believe there's a case to be made for lowering the company tax, not personal tax, I think we need our health and education systems boosted, it's interesting that a lot of people who want students to have free tertiary education for example would be opposed to paying a little bit more tax in order to get it because governments get money from taxation, but I think there's a case to be made for lowering the company tax because you'd be able to reinvest that money in research and development and market access development and so on and you'd get a better economy and more opportunities for the future. SIMON I want to come to that in just a couple of minutes if I have time, but you alluded to the fact that this current Labour government is different to the Labour Party that you left in the late 80s, how so? JIM Well for example we're not selling any state assets in fact we're buying them back, I mean the Air New Zealand that I opposed the sale of in 1989 we bought it back, the Railways that the National Party sold but Labour would have we bought the tracks back at least. The Kiwibank which of course was the Post Office Savings Bank which was sold to the Australia New Zealand Bank we've actually now got a new bank and we've got it because of the work we've done inside that government and of course it couldn’t have been done in the 80s because there was an asset sales programme and it couldn’t have been done from inside the Labour Party it had to be done as a coalition partner with a deal. I got 80 million dollars to start that bank from Michael Cullen very reluctantly, both Helen and Michael said they wouldn’t even open an account with Kiwibank, I possibly think they have now, as have 340 thousand other New Zealanders. SIMON Several of those events you mentioned though were predicated on economic circumstances at the time but the reality though is that the Labour Party currently still subscribes to the three fundamental pillars of Rogernomics doesn’t it and isn’t that really the reason that you left originally? JIM No I don’t believe that’s true at all. SIMON Reserve Bank Act? JIM Well the Reserve Bank Act has been made more flexible, the range of inflation that’s permissible is wider, the Reserve Bank Governor has to take into account economic circumstances and repercussions in ways that the former government didn’t and of course I have a role now as Minister of Economic Industry and Regional Development which was completely absent from governments of the 70s and 80s and I've been given significant funding over 200 million dollars a year to develop our regional industry and economic development opportunities in ways that Roger Douglas would probably go pale in terms of what we've been able to do now. SIMON Let's go back and look at some of that era because in his autobiography just out of course David Lange said of you and I quote 'I could never separate his principles from his ambition, advancement of the principle inevitably demanded the advancement of Anderton' – your response? JIM It's a bit funny isn’t it, it's hard to advance yourself in 1989 by leaving a mainstream party under first past the post. No one had ever left a mainstream party and stood against it and won in the whole history of New Zealand politics. SIMON He's not talking about you in the context of leaving though, he's talking about you in the context of within the caucus. JIM Oh well you see David's changed his tune a little bit to be generous. SIMON How so? JIM I mean well he was a significant proponent of and supporter for Roger Douglas and his policies, in fact at a Labour Party Conference where I was opposing the imposition of the Goods and Services Tax and was critical of the government's proposal, David Lange said anyone who came between him and Roger Douglas would be sent into political oblivion. Of course that tune changed quite a bit about the time that David Lange retired from politics and since, but I haven’t changed my view at any time since then and David has. SIMON How much responsibility though do you take for undermining the party at the time, I mean he also said you had a great chorus of followers, Helen Clark among then at that time which kept up a dispiriting commentary on the activities of the party's parliamentary wing. Do you take some responsibility for undermining Labour? JIM Well no Labour did a pretty good job in government of undermining itself, I mean I gave a – you know we had three minutes in caucus to say our piece each week and I remember once saying can anybody tell me who's going to vote for us in 1990, we've alienated the students, we've alienated the superannuitants, we've alienated the farmers, we've alienated the business community and we've alienated the workers, and we've even alienated public servants, so who's left, and the truth was no one was left, Labour Party people stayed at home in droves in 1990 and the government's demise was there for all to see for three years before, we were very lucky that the stock market crash didn’t happen three months earlier in 1987 otherwise we wouldn’t have won that election either. SIMON Coming through to the mid 90s though by that stage your relationship with Helen Clark has undertaken certain roller coaster rides. In the Listener on the 1st of July 1995… JIM You're so kind. SIMON You said and I want to quote you this, you said in 95 there was no question Helen Clark was being held to ransom by Labour's right wing but if she was genuine about what she used to believe she can't believe what she says now or tries to defend. JIM Yes. SIMON How do you reconcile that sort of statement with where you are today propping up both her and the very same principles really? JIM Well Helen also said in a book that she was in that she wouldn’t go down in a hail of bullets with Jim Anderton so you know there's been things said on both side. We you know I'm a professional politician, if you want to do good things for people in the political arena in our parliamentary system you’ve gotta be in government and you’ve gotta be around the cabinet table, I know that. I couldn’t have been around the cabinet table if David Lange and Roger Douglas and the way the government was run then even if I'd wanted to, it would have been impossible I know that. From the back bench you can say these things but now when Labour changed in the late 90s and we invited Helen Clark to our conference in 1998 for a rapprochement between the party I then led and Labour so that we could get a change of government because it was quite clear that if we kept fighting each other there would be no change of government and then the people that we represented wouldn’t get a fair shake. I think they have had a fair shake since 1999, look at the economy, you know we have some good fortune but you make the best of your good fortune and we've driven through the opening windows that have been there for the New Zealand economy and I believe if I hadn’t taken the steps that I had to work with Labour then some of that at least would not have happened. SIMON Leader of Jim Anderton's Progressive Party, Jim Anderton, thank you so much for joining us on the programme today. JIM Thank you Simon.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- SIMON Welcome back, joining us are our guest commentators, Colin James and Simon Collins. Colin I'll start with you, your impressions of Jim Anderton just then. COLIN Oh a very polish performance and I was most impressed that he was able to be succinct, quite often with Jim Anderton you get a very long speech. I remember sitting at one conference and one of his senior officials was sitting just behind me and said where's he got to, this was a six page speech and we were about 40 minutes in and I said he's got to page four. He was very succinct and I think quite polished and professional very much the established Minister. Three points I would pick up from it, one is his comment about the problem that big parties have running governments that don’t crush their best friend as he put it. The Alliance got into real difficulty 1999 to 2002, then New Zealand First into real difficulty in post 1996. SIMON Is he their best friend though? COLIN Well he's their closest friend and he's working very closely, your point actually he became part of the Labour Cabinet I think in this last three years, almost indistinguishable, yes he has a particular dimension that he adds, two or three dimensions but people see him pretty much now as back in the Labour Party, your point. So yeah there's that closeness. SIMON He might be taken for granted are you saying? COLIN Yeah and United Future had the same problem this time so big parties and every now and then Labour has said something nice about United Future to try and build them up in the electorate's eyes and whether they’ll be able to do that in this campaign is going to be quite interesting, but it is a factor how do you keep your best friends alive. The second point that I noticed and you picked up on it again, is would he have left the Labour Party if it was the one – he said he wouldn’t have been leaving the Labour Party if it was the one that it was now, but the one that is now is a free trading Labour Party with a monetarist approach to the running inflation and if it had been doing those things in the 1980s I think he would have had almost as much difficulty. SIMON So the metamorphosis is his isn’t it? COLIN Well not entirely because you remember he focused on the asset sales and this government has made it an article of faith that it's going to retain state owned enterprises, so he can make that distinction and it was a pretty important one at the time and it's an important one now, you notice the way in which on Thursday night Don Brash was very tentative and very uncomfortable talking about privatisation and asset sales, so there is a major difference there between the Labour Party now and what it was then back in the 1980s, and also the direction is different and I spose you could say the direction was going to go on and on forever down this track and the direction is quite different with this government, it's been pulling back a bit correcting things. The third point that I'd just make about his comment was that reference to 1998 when Labour and the Alliance got back together and they presented themselves to the people in the following year as a government in waiting so that people who – in New Zealand political culture people vote governments in or out – and they had a government to vote for. Now Don Brash on Thursday night was having trouble presenting that on the debate. SIMON And of course you’ve just seen Helen Clark and Jeanette Fitzsimons the best of friends, this is more of the government in waiting is it, stability security you know what you're getting. COLIN Yes we've got a government here have they got a government on the other side. SIMON COLLINS It's interesting actually I found a few photos for Jim Anderton's party in my sampling and some of those people were swinging from Labour or other parties to Jim Anderton's Progressives and they have the idea that a government needs a friend so it's actually something that people have picked up from MMP…. It's absurd in this case because Jim Anderton's going to be in anyway so whether you vote for him or Labour doesn’t make any difference to the outcome of the election, but people think it does, people think that it's good for government to have another party in there and some people were even – I mean they would vote for New Zealand First because they think that whoever's in needs somebody to restrain them and so the minor parties have a role that people see value in retraining the major parties and Jim Anderton may be for people who are more traditional Labour Party voters, see Jim Anderton's in there to make sure Labour doesn’t veer off into some free trade deal that going to sell everything up, you know he still has role in politics. SIMON They're not going to challenge the 5% threshold at any point though are they conceivably, I know we never say never. SIMON COLLINS No they're not, where they would actually be a real advantage and a small one to the government is if there were so few party votes that Jim Anderton's seat was an overhang seat so that would be a bonus seat for Labour but I suspect actually he's going to get enough party votes to justify his seat. SIMON He had ambitions in the Herald this morning of wanting to head the Ministry of Education, how realistic is that ambition would you say? SIMON COLLINS I haven’t tested that one I have to say but I think Trevor Mallard has more or less done his chips there.
SIMON As Former Deputy Secretary of State Kenneth Dam was an advisor to Ronald Reagan as New Zealand prepared to declare itself nuclear free. More recently he's worked under George W Bush as Deputy Secretary to the United States Treasury, Mr Dam is in New Zealand for the Gateway to America Trade Summit and he's here with me now. Mr Dam in your address to the Trade Summit yesterday you said a New Zealand US free trade agreement and I quote you is a 'no brainer that’s good for both countries that would expand trade between the two countries and it would be unlikely to be controversial in the US' why then is it no happening? MR DAM Well we're going into a narrow window in which it should happen if it's going to happen otherwise it'll probably be put off for a few years and that has to do with the door around the special congressional procedures we have and so forth, there's just not a lot of space for a free trade agreement to be debated as it will be on the floor of the Congress. SIMON You're suggesting that the limitation to progress on the free trade agreement is process issues in the US, nothing to do with us? MR DAM No no in fact I think a free trade agreement with New Zealand would go through much more easily than say the central American free trade area which was with the central American countries and that passed by only two votes, so you know that was close. SIMON So simply we're just in the log jam of countries trying to get one? MR DAM I think that’s right a lot of countries want to get in and frankly it has nothing to do with New Zealand as such, but we've had free trade agreements recently with some countries from the middle eastern world broadly defined like Bahrain and Morocco and earlier Jordan and you can see the connection to the trouble in the Middle East. SIMON Well last week on this programme alluding to what you’ve just said our former Prime Minister Mike Moore who I think you know said the nuclear free policy did impact on our ability to secure that free trade agreement and I'm going to quote him 'somehow you’ve managed to do a free trade agreement with Vietnam where's the security issue and when's the last time Guatemala Nicaragua or Mexico put any of their lads on the line as New Zealand is doing in Afghanistan' and then of course in this morning's paper another former Prime Minister Jim Bolger said 'everybody knows it sits there everybody wonders why New Zealand's not getting on to the list to negotiate a free trade agreement when countries like Morocco do'. Two former Prime Ministers and what's the answer to that? MR DAM Well the answer is that there just isn’t much time or space to get it done before the time expires. The way we do it in the United States is the executive branch can only negotiate with the advance consent of the Congress and that is always hard to get, limited in time, and a very complicated procedure in the Congress. So executives have to make choices. SIMON It's not tied into security though? MR DAM Well it's tied in in another way in the sense that I think the President's very concerned about the global war on terrorism transforming the Middle East, democratising that part of the world and therefore a lot of the focus goes there, but that’s not negative against New Zealand it's just a fact of life. SIMON So the President's attitude to New Zealand based on our debatable allegiance with America is not a factor? MR DAM Well I think that in matter of fact the presence of your troops in Afghanistan and reconstruction in Iraq has given New Zealand a positive image, now there've been issues in the past absolutely but right now those issues I think are fading away in the sense that President Bush and Condoleezza Rice the Secretary of State are trying to build bridges across past differences not widen them. SIMON You mentioned our role in Afghanistan and other issues and of course the cold war has ended, why isn’t that enough to reinstate ANZUS as a starting point? MR DAM Well I think there the issues of the 80s play a role, the idea of ANZUS is it had a security element and the free passage and visits by vessels that might be nuclear powered obviously was problem in the past. I think it might be a problem in the future depending upon New Zealand's position and I don’t see our position changing because our vessels are nuclear powered and they can't visit – they can't change to be conventionally powered. SIMON So what actually needs to be done, I mean how do we drive this forward, everyone seems to be dancing around the issue, what do both sides need to do, what does New Zealand need to do to rebuild a relationship with the US? MR DAM I think the relationship is fine it's just if you want to expand it to – for example if you're worried about nuclear weapons there's something called the PSI the Proliferation Security Initiative and the idea is that the greatest danger of a nuclear weapon is that it'll be brought into a country by a terrorist and there are example of nuclear materials and weapons being transferred for instance like North Korea by vessel, and so this agreement which a number of countries have joined means that we will co-operate in tracking those vessels and having the right country intercept them which will work the smoothest, now that means the navies have to exercise together, I think naval exercises would be a good idea. SIMON The relationship is not as good as it could be is it I mean we're quite conscious of the fact that we're no longer called allies instead very very very good friends, how do we get back to the ally status, is that what you're saying start with the naval exercise. SIMON Well I think that would help but I don’t think that’s – you know it's really up to how you feel you can best demonstrate that you are allies or you are part of a common foreign policy and so forth with the United States and with Western Europe. SIMON Do we need to do something about our nuclear free legislation? MR DAM Well it may be that that was what you need to do, I can't say, I think obviously that’s what is in everyone's mind here it seems to be part of your election campaign, it's really not discussed in the United States, those of us who have been around and know about this problem, I'm sure the US Navy knows about this problem but it's nothing that is affecting day to day relationships. SIMON Going back to 1984/85 when you were working under George Schultz why did things go so wrong at that period? There is a reference that George Schultz misunderstood David Lange's intent, what do you know of that? MR DAM Well I've always admired David Lange and I think he tried to create a constructive relationship, I don’t know exactly, I know that I was chairing from the American side a meeting with New Zealand and Australia on this very subject and it was rather sticky I guess I would say, but there was still a chance to put it together, I don’t know exactly why this never got resolved but it didn’t. SIMON It's been asserted that George Schultz understood that David Lange would concede the nuclear free policy for the sake of keeping the relationship aside and David Lange in his memoirs said that was never the case and that’s been backed up, did George Schultz talk to you of this? MR DAM No I don’t know anything about that and I'm not exactly sure when that is, I'd left in June of 1985 and this may have happened after I left. SIMON I want to come back to your Trade Summit address yesterday. You finished, the very last comment you made was you said I hope the New Zealand business community will work hard with your government to be unified and ready went next year's window for negotiation opens that you referred to. What exactly do you believe needs to happen for them to be as you call it unified and ready? MR DAM Well for example I don’t know anything about your internal politics particularly in this area and if there are differences between the agricultural community and the business community that needs to be ironed out here rather than in front of the US Congress. SIMON Let me bring our panellists in at this point. Questions you'd like to ask. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- MR DAM Well my theory is it's gonna happen, should happen, as I said it's a no brainer so why done we get it done now as opposed to maybe when there's a new president and some new authority, but that would be 2010, that’s why I said the business community agricultural community had to get together with the government and thresh out any issues that might arise. I don’t think and I hear it's clear what they US formal position is the nuclear issue is not part of the discussion. Free trade area agreements rest on their own merits it's just a question of who get through this narrow eye of the needle. COLIN You also said it would be easy to do but there is the dairy issue which is quite a pertinent issue in the United States isn’t it, and dairy would be big for us. MR DAM Dairy will be an issue but that’s the kind of issue you can work out in advance I think, there are partnerships with the American dairy community of your forums – its total displacement of American dairy production would be less than 1% and that’s of course it may well be opposed but who has the votes. COLIN So you think that’s manageable in the Congress? MR DAM I hope it's manageable I just don’t know enough about it to say – you know it's management I think it's manageable but you don’t know that’s why you need to get together and have advanced discussions. COLIN Well one step the United States could take to break this deadlock, difficulty, would be to send the Antarctic ships back through New Zealand and they aren’t nuclear powered I don’t think are they? MR DAM That’s an issue I'm not familiar with, I can't sCopyright to Front Page Ltd but may be used PROVIDED attribution is made to TVOne and Agendapeak to. SIMON Charles Swindells left here with quite a strong message that we weren’t doing enough about the relationship and I'm harking back, we're getting inconsistent message from people we hear and see. MR DAM I think what he said and certainly what I think what he meant having read the speech is you know if the nuclear issue is important then let's have an open dialogue about it, let's really talk about it rather than kind of allude to it and letting it hang out there, dialogue's a good thing and open dialogue is even better. SIMON Kenneth Dam, thank you very much for your time in coming on Agenda today. Copyright to Front Page Ltd but may be used PROVIDED attribution is made to TVOne and Agenda |
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