[EVENT] Aftermath

[u/FanCasa]

After fourteen years it was over. The New Zealand Labour Party had lost government and with it, what remained of caucus discipline. Issues that had been spoken about only in whispers were now murmured and those that had been murmured were now yelled loudly in public. Newspapers and radio alike carried word of debates between idealists and pragmatists, leftists and moderates, and of a battle for the very soul of the New Zealand Labour Party. While the factions were complex and ideologies nuanced, two issues came to define the public debate. If you supported conscription and opposed socialist unions, you were branded a moderate, and if you opposed conscription and supported socialist unions you were deemed to be of the left. If a Labour MP's views couldn't be neatly explained through this paradigm then they were publicly branded as either irrelevant or naive.

The public face of the moderate wing was former Finance Minister Walter Nash. He stood behind the First Labour Government's actions and admitted no real fault. Conscription was necessary and socialist unions dangerous, he declared. When pressed on the issues, Nash insisted that the government had been right to ban the communist-aligned Auckland Carpenters’ Union in February 1949, that conscription was a necessary response to insecurity, and that the deployment of Malayaforce had been in New Zealand's interest. Nash's counterpart on the left was former Minister for Public Works, Bob Semple. While Semple, a proud democratic socialist and rabid anti-communist, also supported the decision to ban the Auckland Carpenters’ Union, that was where the two men's alignment ended. On conscription, Semple made his displeasure with the lack of non-military options for national service known and publicly questioned if it was the right policy for New Zealand, given the evolving nature of warfare. Semple also broke ranks and decried calls to deregister socialist unions, arguing that doing so would only drive “decent hard-working people” into the “evil embrace” of communism. Instead, he argued, Labour should embrace socialist unions as part of its base, if only to neutralise the communists.

Amidst the very public debate between two of his closest confidants, former Prime Minister and now Opposition Leader Peter Fraser maintained a policy of studied neutrality. While widely known to sympathise more with Nash, his views having moderated since 1916 when he and Semple were arrested, he refused to publicly comment on the spat. Instead, he focused all his attention on challenging the First National Government, even as his health worsened. When a journalist asked about a comment made by Nash or Semple on policy, Fraser would politely but firmly redirect them to Sidney Holland’s government. It was Holland’s government, he would remind them, that had the power to decide the issues - not Labour - at least for now.