Bradford Sue: General Debates 
Bradford Sue: General Debates 
[Volume:611;Page:8541] 
SUE BRADFORD (Green) 
: 
 The last couple of weeks have seen a couple of episodes that are sadly illuminating about the state of the Labour Party in Parliament as of September 2003. First of all we saw the strange affair of the Prime Minister’s attack on our co-leader Jeanette Fitzsimons who must be one of the most assiduously hard-working and fair select committee chairpeople in Parliament. This unexpected verbal assault was accompanied of course by much publicised prime ministerial statements showing a kind of hubris which was thankfully not particularly visible from Labour in its first term after the 1999 election. Then this week the New Zealand Council of the Labour Party sent a unanimous message to its caucus expressing its “very grave concern at aspects of the Gambling Bill.” 
Jim Peters 
: Whose council? 
SUE BRADFORD 
: Labour’s council. Did the Labour members at their caucus meeting yesterday pay any attention to this memo? Apparently not as by 10 o’clock last night the Committee stage of the Gambling Bill had been pushed through at high speed and without any change of heart from the Government benches. With this bill the Government faced a number of stark choices: going with the Greens which would mean compromising so that local councils could control how many pokie venues they had and where; or going with United Future and allowing local authorities to control only 16 percent—one-sixth—of the gambling machines in this country. Likewise Labour could have gone with the Greens and stopped the Lotteries Commission getting into Internet gambling—one of the most pernicious forms of gaming now available—or they could have gone with United Future and taken problem gambling to a whole new level. On these and on at least three other critical issues Labour chose to go with the anti-family right-wing United Future party every time. 
This bill may well be the watershed marking the moment when we look back and say: “Yes there it was; that was the moment when Labour definitely turned to the right again—the moment they chose the gambling industry over the people they were elected to represent.” The ghosts of the fourth Labour Government have been haunting this Gambling Bill and in fact they are haunting Labour on the GE issue as well. We know from many polls that a majority of Labour voters and supporters do not support their leadership’s gung-ho support for the immediate lifting of the moratorium on GE release. As of Monday we have very clear evidence that even the party’s own leading internal body certainly did not want its MPs aligning with United Future rather than the Greens over the Gambling Bill. 
I am afraid all this takes me unavoidably back to the 1980s when for example David Lange as Prime Minister said that the Government was prepared to go on ignoring its own party’s remits—for years and years if necessary. How many times did the membership of the Labour Party tell the fourth Labour Government to stop change direction and move away from the new right? It never listened and members can see what happened. The Labour Party was destroyed or nearly destroyed and spent 9 long years in Opposition. 
On behalf of the Green Party I am making a plea to current Labour MPs: please do not let history repeat itself. Our party continues to be willing to work with Labour on the many areas we have of common concern whether of workers’ rights and welfare reform conservation transport or a host of other issues where sharing experiences and ideas can produce many useful forward-looking synergies. Labour does not have to dig another final ditch for itself as it did in the mid to late-1980s. That party does not have to succumb to the fatal temptations of what seems to be absolute power or to what appears to be the easier blandishments of the United Future right. 
There is a pattern for Governments who last for more than one term in this country a pattern into which this illustrious 2003 version of Labour seems to be falling. Somewhere in the second term those Governments come to believe they are born to rule and they simultaneously lose track of where both their own memberships and the voting public want them to be. Labour need look no further than to its 1980s predecessor or to the currently depleted National benches to see what happens when people in power—no matter how well intentioned—start to lose track of where they have come from.