Anderton does Labour deal

Twenty years after he split with Labour, Progressives leader Jim Anderton has all but returned to the fold, with a deal allowing his activists to stand as Labour candidates and a promise to campaign "party vote Labour" in 2011.

In another sign that his Progressive Party and Labour have all but merged, his key adviser, John Pagani, who campaigned for Labour in the recent Mt Albert by-election, has thrown his hat in the ring to replace Mike Smith as Labour Party secretary.

Mr Anderton, who was a Labour MP and its president before he split with the party over the Rogernomics reforms of the 1980s, said yesterday he had prepared a manual of more than 100 pages for Labour called Organising to Win, to help it "remarshall" as he had in 1984. He briefed the Labour caucus this week.

The Progressive Party will not run a party list at the next election. In 2008 it won 0.91 per cent of the party vote.

Labour needed another 11 per cent of the list vote to win, he said, and even 1 per cent could make a difference to who could govern.

He had not yet decided if he would stand in his Christchurch seat of Wigram, which he has held since 1984. He will be 71 at the next election in 2011.

"I'm not immortal ... but I have seen what happens to party leaders who think they are immortal."

He had discussed joint membership with the Labour council and they had agreed Progressives' membership "is not incompatible with membership of the Labour Party".

He expected four or five party members to stand as Labour candidates. "Some members of the Progressive Party who have been working on campaigns have been invited to hold offices in branches." But he would not rejoin Labour.

Mr Anderton formed NewLabour in 1989. It became a constituent party in the Alliance, but he quit to form the Progressives after an internal feud in 2002. He was deputy prime minister between 1999 and 2002 and is the Progressives' sole MP.

- © Fairfax NZ News