“Necessity or Folly.” The life of Jim Anderton

The speaker will be David Grant and he will be talking about his book “Necessity or Folly.” The life of Jim Anderton. David will focus his talk on the “maverick years” 1984-1989.

Necessity or Folly. Jim Anderton’s dramatic exit from the Labour Government in 1989 and its consequences.
There were four distinct periods in Jim Anderton’s political life.
1. His activity from 1964 when he first joined a Labour Party branch in Mangere, Auckland aged 26 at a time when that party’s organisation was floundering. He helped to grow it leading the charge in particular through his very activist stint as the party’s president from 1979 until he became MP for Sydenham in 1984
2. The mavwerick years as he becomes increasingly into conflict with the new government’s right-wing swerve as it pursues a Friedmanite agenda led by Roger Douglas. In April 1989, feeling betrayed and having alredy survived an attempt to expel him on constitutional grounds, he quit the party in protest.
3. Within weeks he sets an alternative NewLabour Party holding traditional Labour values and later merges with three other parties to form the Alliance Parties. In the early to mid-1990s the Alliance was more popular that Labour or National in opinion polls and Anderton was the country’s most preferred Prime Minister. When MMP arrived in 1996, 13 Alliance MPs were elected to parliament.
4. His ‘conventional’ political period whenhe became a highly regarded and hard working minister of the Crown in the Labour-Alliamce and later the Labour-Progressive Coalition governments from 1999-2008 when he retired. It is important to note he was a highly popular local MP no matter which party he stood for through those years wining every election with handsome majorities