Labour Saving: A Memoir

by Michael Cullen

The gin and tonics in their office, mixed roughly 50:50, were a somewhat different matter; I soon learnt to sip very slowly to avoid disaster.

Saving Labour has at times been as much about saving it from itself as from its various enemies.

The Greens did not have a whip, a term they regarded as redolent of violence. In their case I had to work with a musterer, Ian Ewen-Street, who was a farmer. Personally, I would have taken offence at the implication I was a sheep if I had been in the Greens’ caucus. Sometimes in politics one can try a little too hard to be seen as different. The Greens were also distinguished by being the only multi-member party with no Māori MPs.

The late Jeanette Fitzsimons’ speech was about as generous as one ever gets from a Green Party member. (Anne always says they would make terrible teachers — it is nearly all criticism and very little praise.)

‘How come the Greens care so much about the planet when they spend so little time on it?’

Looking at New Zealand in late 2020 I am reminded of what Abraham Lincoln said at one point: ‘the occasion is piled high with difficulty’. Equally it is piled high with opportunity; I cannot think of two better people to grasp it.