Labour heads see unity at conference

Press, 6 September 1983, Page 6

Labour heads see unity at conference

From

ROBERT CROSS

in Auckland

Affirmations of unity and success flew like confetti yesterday as the two central figures at Labour’s annual conference delivered their summing-up speeches. The party leader, Mr David Lange, expressed sheer delight at the lack of dissension, and at the policies the conference adopted — and rejected.

The party president, Mr J. P. Anderton, said that it was a good conference, remarkable for its discipline and maturity. Both played down the disagreements over policy that exist between them, and indicated that some tacit reconciliation was achieved.

Mr Lange felt that his leader’s address on Saturday evening gained him the party organisation’s majority approval for the first time.

He told delegates this during the traditional end of conference exhortation: “On Saturday you said that I had the challenge to lead you to the next election. I was humbled by the way you showed by your very body language that you meant it.”

The moderate policy line that Mr Lange had pushed during the months before the conference was swallowed almost whole.

The exception was his view on nuclear issues, which looks as though it has no future among Labour’s rank and file.

Mr Lange said he did not see this moderation as a personal victory. “It is a victory for the party,” she said.

Labour could now go into the next election with realistic, saleable policies endorsed by almost the entire party. Mr Anderton said he did not see the conference policies as moderate. He saw them as being in line with a call he made last Friday evening for a return to the party’s radical roots. This conflicted with statements he made about the way the conference handled tricky constitutional remits. “They were for, in some cases, quite radical change, and the conference showed itself willing to compromise ... to a position that everyone could live with,” he said.

He also said that there had been the possibility of a “charge on the more radical remits.” Instead the conference had decided on taking a different course of concentrating on “preparing for government seriously and not on internecine war.”

Asked directly whether there were differences between himself and Mr Lange, he said that Mr Lange was more moderate than he was. “That does not mean that that in itself is a problem for the party to cope with.”

He said the important thing was that once policies were decided, the whole party swung in behind them.

Asked whether he now backed the moderate policies promoted by Mr Lange, he answered indirectly: “The policy-making role is here at this conference, and at the policy council — that is what I back.”

Unity between the party’s Parliamentary wing and its organisational wing had been achieved. This was done through both agreeing to “live with what is determined” by the conference. This meant living with internal differences and personal likes and dislikes. “This conference has welded the Parliamentary party and the organisation together on that basis,” he said.

Although he refused to come out and say so, this was taken as meaning that Mr Anderton and his liberal Left supporters had agreed to toe the moderates’ line in public. Mr Anderton said that any dissent at the party’s highest level would be betrayal “given that the mood of the conference is for victory for the people we represent.” By dissent he meant the undermining of any person, group or political viewpoint in a clandestine way. He was clearly not referring to public dissent. Earlier he had told journalists that he disagreed with the economic policies of the party’s economic spokesmen, Mr Roger Douglas and Mr David Caygill. In his parting words to delegates, Mr Lange asserted that unity was the conference’s greatest achievement.

“Sometimes we are ruptured, but at this conference we were not,” he said. “The really marvellous things about this conference was that we were supposed' to be absolutely doing each other over, and this conference has shown we are united.”