KEY POINTS:
Former Labour leader Harry Holland is "Kiwi of the Week" on a website a work colleague pointed me to yesterday. It's run by the History Group at the Ministry of Culture and Heritage. You can find out what event of particular significance in New Zealand happened on your birthday, someone else's, or what happened on today's date.
I went searching on it last night to have a look at today, July 8.
On this day 115 years ago, the New Zealand Racing Conference was formed to work out the rules and regulations of thoroughbred racing in New Zealand. That, incidentally, is an awfully long time after the first race meeting in New Zealand, on Feb 5 and 6, 1842 in Auckland, according to research by my late grandmother in a book on another forebear.
Also, according to the history site, yesterday was the 92nd birthday of the formation of the Labour Party. That will be why Harry Holland is the Kiwi of the Week. At least one Labour leader is having a good week.
[There's a mini bio of Holland - unionist, socialist, journalist, politician - under his picture but a link on the Labour Party anniversary piece points to a more detailed piece on Holland from the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography.]
The real-time Labour caucus is meeting today at Helen Clark's residence, Premier House in Thorndon, for an important day-long caucus meeting.
There will be some discussion of last week's events when Clark abandoned the habit of her premiership and led a direct attack on John Key over his Tranz Rail shares and what seemed to have been a conflict of interest.
Her practice has been to keep above the fray, to avoid engaging National leaders lest it helps to elevate them to her level. That theory was fine while she was always in front but it serves no purpose now.
The Clark offensive has been wrongly cast, in my view, as a personal attack and even "gutter" politics by Key himself in a very irritated interview he had yesterday with Mikey Havoc.
[It's all the evidence National needs of its mistaken persistence to neither confirm or deny using Crosby Textor consultants.]
But Clark's attack on Key last week - and this - was personal only in as much as it was aimed directly at Key the politician and his actions rather than his party.
It was not dirty or gutter politics. To suggest that Clark should not be venturing into such territory and should remain above the fray would be to deny Labour its strongest weapon.
If Key's untested leadership is to be one of Labour's primary targets, Clark has to lead it and get into the fray. She can't afford not to.
The attack was a failure in as much as she fluffed her facts the first time around. There emerged another unexplained conflict of interest issue, just not the one she initially identified. But it was legitimate line of attack.
It was probably too complicated to get traction and it has been painted as desperation.
The greater desperation was Michael Cullen's attack on the truckies boss' Tony Friedlander over the fact he was a National MP 20 years ago. And the greater failure by Labour was its failure to anticipate the response of the road user charge increase - announced on July 1.
I have been curious about the timing of the announcement and how the decision was made. Annette King's office gave me the details yesterday. The increase was made at the cabinet meeting on June 23 and put into regulation by executive council on June 23 - more than a week before the public announcement on the same as the rail service was renationalised.
The calculated hope, surely, was to time it for a big news day in the expectation that the truckies' protest would be drowned out by the "bigger" news story.
Clark's advice to the Labour troops today will be blunt. She will be telling them to put on "the hard hats," she said yesterday. ie. meaning "it's war."
Labour will have to be careful about its attacks on Key. His strategists have branded him "the optimist" as a contrast to the inevitable "negativity" of a Labour attack campaign on his leadership.
But it's not time for the Commander to sit back and wait for only five-star issues to drop into her lap.
Not every issue it runs with will be a winner - or it might be safer to say that not every issue Labour runs will be a loser.
On another matter, and take note History Group: On July 8, 1988, 20 years ago today The Auckland Sun, much loved by those of us who worked on it, came to a shattering close.
It was the first daily newspaper to set up in 40 years, but it lasted only 11 months, the victim of boardroom manoeuvrings between Brierley Investments and INL during the stockmarket crash.
The editor was Peter Pace, from the Sun in London, rumoured to have produced the infamous "Gotcha" headline on the sinking of the General Belgrano in 1982.
He brought with him an energetic young sub, Julie Christie back from her OE, who worked in the sports section and went on to run her own TV empire. A few Herald colleagues worked on it, Brian Rudman, Wynne Gray, Chris Rattue. Sean Plunket and Fran O'Sullivan were the political reporters. A great bunch of blokes now in West Australia (Pat Hanning, Bevan Eakins and Tony Barrass) were the backbone of the subbery where I worked with Vanya Shaw and Phil Taylor and Richard Naidu among others. Others like Sue Williams and Jimmy Thompson gravitated to papers in Sydney.
The Herald and the Auckland Star took on some of the Sun refugees at the time of the closure but the Star itself closed a short time later.
I am very proud to work for the Herald but I still mourn the loss of its rival and the wasted effort ut into it.
My friend Yvonne van Dongen wrote an excellent biography of Brierley in 1990 and she got him to handwrite an apology to me in the back of it for closing the Sun. It was meant to be something to chuckle at - but all the same I'll never forgive him.
