Yesterday was a complicated day for the Labour Party.
The funeral of former party leader Mike Moore – Prime Minister, Leader of the Opposition, member of David Lange’s Fish and Chip brigade, champion of free trade – raised more than a few ghosts and brought to the surface some deep and defining arguments for the soul of the party.
Moore was at the heart of the fourth Labour government that was in so many ways not a Labour government. The administration elected in 1984 that did so much to over-turn the power of the state that previous Labour governments had worked so hard to build.
There in the chapel at Dilworth School were the likes of Sir Roger Douglas and Richard Prebble, still and forever viewed by some in the party as if they have tails and horns and carry a pitchfork. There too were kings of capital, such as Sir Michael Fay. Speakers praised his commitment to free trade, his work for the World Trade Organisation when tens of thousands of protesters were at the door in Seattle, his rebuilding of New Zealand’s relationship with American after the nuclear-free row.
Yet that was only ever part of Moore, which is why the Labour Party for so long has never quite known what to do with him. He was detached in a way from that 84 government, so often on the road with trade missions. He was always bigger and beyond the internal party squabbles and never just a Rogernome.
Moore was tribal Labour to his bones. His coffin was carried into the funeral to the Jimmy Barnes song ‘Working Class Man’ and it was completely authentic in a way few Labour MPs could now claim. He was born dirt poor, did ordinary working class jobs for a decade before entering parliament and never gave up his union membership, even when he was Director-General of the WTO.
The moment from The 9th Floor that kept coming back to me yesterday was when, unprompted, he leant towards Guyon Espiner and said, “you might not believe in class. I do”. He used to urge people to be a ‘happy warrior’, Clayton Cosgrove told the peopler gathered. And the clear thread running through his life was his determination to do something to improve the lots of those on struggle street.
When MMP arrived he was championed as the man who could have carved out a centre party for New Zealand that could have been at the fulcrum of our politics for decades to come (the sort of role Peter Dunne instead tried to fill). But he could never leave his party. He was Labour through and through, even when they didn’t want a bar of him.
In 1990 he took over from Geoffrey Palmer and his campaigning ability helped Labour win 5-10 seats more than it might have. As he said, he was there to “save the furniture”. If Moore was being strategic it would have been better for him to have let Palmer take the fall and tried to rebuild after. But he took one for the team when the party could have collapsed in on itself. Then in 1993 he buggered the pollsters and almost won an unwinnable election, just three years after the Jim Bolger landslide.
The party – some of whom had actively worked against him to lose the 1993 election, because they were laying the ground for a new beginning under Helen Clark – thanked him by rolling him almost immediately. Yet he didn’t set up that new party. Instead he built an international career, arguably more influential than any other New Zealander and certainly more so than anyone since Peter Fraser.
Through that time the party hasn’t known whether to condemn or celebrate him. He was continued to reach our to MPs and offer his advice and endless stream of ideas. (One speaker summed up Moore’s life as a quest for ‘ideas that work’).
Yeah, complicated.
So complicated in fact that neither Palmer nor Clark were at the funeral. Clark, it seems, is overseas and I have no idea why Palmer was not there. But can you imagine any living president of any party not attending the funeral of George Bush Sr in 2018? Funerals for fellow Prime Ministers? You just find a way to be there.
Bolger was there. Dame Jenny Shipley read a psalm. Sir John Key and Bill English were both in the pews.
There have only been nine Labour Prime Ministers in New Zealand’s history; only three are living and only one attended.
And it was the one who was there who on this complicated day squared the circle for the party and restored some dignity. Jacinda Ardern captured Mike Moore perfectly as a “true believer”. He believed in people, his causes, his party. They weren’t always popular causes. Those passionate beliefs combined with his restless mind meant he wasn’t always the easiest. And as Ardern acknowledged he was in the midst of what was a troubled time for her party. But then she used the H word. It was a generous balm.
She was speaking on behalf of her party, talking about how “we'“ – Labour members – thought of Moore. And she said ‘we honour him’. I suspect that would have meant the world to him. In this case it was only for one man, one family, not for an entire mosque community or nation, not for families grieving the worst disaster in New Zealand’s history. But once again Ardern found healing words that needed to be said.
That the Labour leader honoured Moore was a poignant moment of grace for the party. And the number of current cabinet members there underlined that and was a sign the party is coming to terms with itself.
The turnout of the good and great at the funeral was impressive, again an acknowledgement of Moore’s life and legacy that I suspect would have meant so much to him.
As the hearse carrying his casket drove away down the school driveway lined with hundreds of Dilworth boys filling the late summer air with a haka, it felt like the man New Zealand politics never quite knew what to do with and yet who served his country through thick and thin, had finally come home.