Mike Moore on Labour
MIKE Oh, Andrew’s got to stick to his guns. He’s good, and he ought to look at changing the party rules.
JESSICA What do you mean by that?
MIKE Party leadership should be controlled by the caucus.
Little will never make that change as he only got four votes in caucus to be leader.
JESSICA And why do you think that’s so important?
MIKE Because you get 5000, 10,000 party members, and they’ll go in a bloc, but they aren’t the caucus. If every member of the Labour Party lived in my old electorate and voted for me, I would still lose the seat.
JESSICA Why as a former prime minister is it important to have the backing of the caucus?
MIKE Because you need to lead people and take them down roads they’ve not travelled before. It’s a very lonely job, and the roads we haven’t travelled in the next few years are going to be important to us. The jobs we’re going to have in the future are not like the jobs we have now. And you’ve got to talk your people through it. If you can’t do that by working the base and working it out, you’ll become a conservative party.
UK Labour shows the problem of going down this path.