
At the beginning of the NLP (NewLabour Party); vice-president Sue Bradford; president Matt McCarten; party MP and leader, Jim Anderton
by Philip Ferguson
Jim Anderton passed away peacefully on Sunday, January 7, just two weeks away from his 80th birthday. I have two sets of views about Anderton: a political assessment and also a personal view, as my parents were friends and strong political supporters and co-workers of Anderton’s for several decades.
First, the personal side. This Anderton, I’ll call Jim. I only met him once and this was when my mother was dying. She had collapsed at home and been subsequently diagonised as riddled with cancer. She went home for a fortnight before being transferred into a rest home with hospice facilities. Jim showed up at my parents’ house with a load of food when my mother came out of hospital. During the visit he gave me his personal cell-phone number and told me to call him at any time; also, that if he was in a meeting and couldn’t answer, he would get back to me straight afterwards. He was particularly concerfned if we had any trouble with the public health bureaucracy – he told me to just let him know and he’d get onto them straight away.
Ferocious in dealing with petty bureaucrats
I knew from my mother that he was ferocious in dealing with state bureaucrats who put any obstacles at all in the way of people receiving their just rights. She had volunteered in Jim’s constituency office for years, both when he was a Labour MP and later, when he (and my parents) departed from Labour and founded the left social-democratic NewLabour Party and, subsequently, the Alliance. I had heard stories from her of being in the office when Jim, outraged at one or other a tale of officious state mistreatment of one of his constituents (or anyone from across Christchurch who visited his office) would literally rip the jumped-up bureaucrat a new one.
My mother had also told me of his personal generosity. The office was in a small block of shops in Selwyn Street in Spreydon and Jim and Carole Anderton’s home was up a driveway at the end of the row of shops. This made it easy for him to dash back to the house and grab (more…)