This coming week will feature a number of pertinent twenty year anniversaries that fell around Queen's Birthday weekend 1989. One was the tragic Tianamen Square massacre in Beijing where the increasingly right-wing rulers of so-called 'Communist' China sent the tanks out to quell popular protest. That same weekend, Ayatollah Khohmeini died in Iran after turning the country into the world's first Islamic republic.

In Wellington that same weekend hundreds of delegates convened for the first formal founding conference of the NewLabour Party. Led by Jim Anderton, the then MP for Sydenham, the party had been formally launched in a cold Sydenham electorate hall one month earlier on May Day, May 1st, 1989. But the delegates who came together at that historic conference set the seal on a new party which aimed to save the very soul of the New Zealand left at a time when it was under sustained attack.

The policies of the Fourth Labour Government had turned a half-century of progressive politics in this country on its head. Rogernomics had turned the Labour Party into a right-wing organisation, barely distinguishable from its National Party opponents. Having slain much of the Keynesian economic mindset predicated on the maintenance of full employment and the welfare state, Labour was now in danger of devouring itself as both the remaining left and right factions engaged in a continuing civil war.

Those honourable left wingers, democratic socialists, revolutionaries and social democrats alike, chose to exit the Labour Party as the idea of changing the party from within was failing. It was better to go outside and capture electoral support in an attempt to derail the New Right juggernaut. NewLabour was seen as the right vehicle for doing that and it was hoped, at the time, that our support levels would grow and that we would, under the leadership of Jim Anderton, supplant what he regarded as 'Old Labour' and become the main party on the left that would go onto challenge National.

Such hopes were held in those heady days of June 1989 and the desire of the leadership and the majority of delegates at the conference (I personally didn't attend though) was that the weekend would begin to see the further growth of NewLabour support. These expectations did have a reasonable foundation in that support for the NLP, as registered in the first post-launch opinion polls, hovered around the 10%-15% mark for most of May 1989.

However, with a carefully watching media contingent present, the whole conference was overshadowed by a few TVNZ journalists and editors who chose to air the most extreme Trotskyite speakers (mainly from Bill Logan's Wellington-based Permanent Revolutionary Group) who suggested re-naming the party the 'Workers Labour Party'(even though the title 'NewLabour Party' was not very original in my view). The broadcasting of these images, often straight after (and juxtaposing almost) the bloody images from Beijing was enough to send what nascent public support there was plummeting. Ordinary voters were therefore implicitly reminded by the media that New Labour equalled extreme socialism and that extreme socialism equalled bloodthirsty dictatorship.

After the conference, NewLabour was largely ignored by the media and even support for Jim Anderton in the crucial Sydenham seat fell precipitously to the extent where even, as Anderton himself has recollected, he feared being swept away by either Labour or National at the 1990 election. What this incident also was did was to incidentally strengthen the hand of the conservative social democrats under Anderton (who became known as the Andertonistas) on the ruling National Council of the NLP at the expense of the more left-leaning faction headed by then party president Matt McCarten.

Over time the effects of this conservative social democratic versus democratic socialist faction battle became clearer. Anderton was not a person (as time has shown) who entertains dissent easily and within 12 months then party vice-president Sue Bradford (now a Green MP), Chris Trotter (then party publicity officer) and his wife Francesca Holloway had effectively parted company with the NLP over Anderton's domineering tactics. Other comrades and friends I know stayed on (as I did) due to the fact that, despite Anderton, NewLabour was the only genuine left-wing show in town as Labour effectively under the leaderships of Mike Moore, Geoffrey Palmer and even Helen Clark remained a Rogernomics party although with a much softened social policy stance.

NewLabour, as a whole, though continued to enunciate a vision of a progressive social democratic policy framework fitted around a traditional Keynesian economic programme and a restoration of the welfare state with provision for improved social welfare, housing, health and education programmes. It's founding Red-Green Charter also espoused a far more progressive eco-socialist vision and it was with great difficulty (from what I remember being told) that Anderton was persuaded to go along with it due to his desire to perhaps dissociate himself and the party from anything socialist, especially after the PRG debacle.

The founding of the Alliance and NewLabour's effective morphing into it followed in late 1991 after Anderton's stunning retention of Sydenham for the NLP in the 1990 general election. Melding together a coalition of the NLP with the Greens, Democrats (Social Credit), Liberals (a maverick conservative party founded by Gilbert Myles and Peter McIntyre) and the Maori sovereigntist party Mana Motuhake (under the leadership of Matiu Rata and Sandra Lee) was one of the most difficult but still successful acts of coalition building in our country's political history.

As the media, in retrospect, rightly noted the Alliance as it was then was a unwieldy electoral accomodation which encompassed, within the same tent, socialists, social democrats, greens, nutty social credit monetary reformers and Maori sovereigntists united by only a single common enemy - the New Right. Otherwise, as I remember hearing reports back from comrades who sat on the Alliance National Council especially, its internal politics were seething with distrust meaning that some of these meetings became mere shouting matches.

Still, Anderton's position as the greater solidifier of the Alliance was strengthened through the need to hold the show together and proclaim publicly that despite all media forecasts, the party wasn't about to fall apart. Anderton became the most powerful political operator in the party but this was at the expense of internal party democracy, especially within the NLP (I was once part of a 1996 activists strike on this very issue staged by the Dunedin North NLP branch which effectively got the shits going within the NewLabour party leadership).

The NLP, all at once by the mid-1990s, provided most of the Alliance activists, policies, candidates and organisers while, at the same time, it was being dismantled from the top in order to create one unified Alliance Party. By the time the Alliance became Labour's coalition partner in 1999, it was almost all over for the NLP as an independent sovereign party within the Alliance. In early 2000, the NLP was formally folded after 11 years of official existence and I remember being one of the few in my branch (to the best of my recollection) to have voted no or at least to have abstained on the National Council recommendation for dissolution when it was put to us. After all, the other constituent parties of the Alliance (especially the Social Credit freaks of the Democrat Party) showed no inclination towards dissolving their own parties.

The rest as they say is history as the Alliance began to disintegrate under some of the tongue biting compromises we were asked to make while in coalition with Labour. However, the NLP still lives on in that most members of the Alliance Party (myself included) today are from that party and the Alliance is now one unified party, albeit shorn of the Greens, Democrats, Liberals and Mana Motuhake. In other words, true democracy has triumphed within the party which is now an amalgam of traditional social democrats like Professor Jim Flynn and democratic socialists such as me.

As a postscript, just today, the Sunday of Queen's Birthday weekend 2009, right wing political blogger Whale Oil called time on the death of the Progressives, Anderton's little Labour-lite vehicle. While I don't agree with Whale Oil's politics, I do agree with him this once on the state of the Progressives given their endorsement of the Labour candidate in the Mount Albert by-election. Perhaps with the demise of the Progressives pending, the NLP's spirit in the form of the 2009 version of the Alliance will live on in defiance of Anderton's attempts to destroy the non-Labour left in New Zealand.

What better way then to remember the great NLP on the 20th anniversary of its foundation!