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And so it begins, the slow reassertion of the rank-and-file over Labour’s failed parliamentarians. There’s an inevitability to this process of democratic renewal. The failures of Labour’s caucus require a large measure of contrition from its members because, when all is said and done, their failures led to the party’s defeat. So Labour’s membership, encouraged to believe that their MPs are ready to step back, listen and learn, will try to step forward.

Stuff and nonsense, of course, Labour’s caucus has no intention of being dictated to by the party membership. It never has and it never will. But, when the caucus’ timidity and utter lack of imagination has led to a crippling electoral loss, it makes sense to let those who claim to have new ideas, and new policies, have the floor. Who knows – some may even turn out to be worth keeping.

The last time this happened was 2009. Helen Clark’s nine- year stint as prime minister had been brought to an end in 2008 by National’s John Key, and she had stepped down from the leadership in favour of Phil Goff.

As leader for 15 years, Clark had dominated the Labour Party to a degree not seen since the days of Peter Fraser. Goff became leader of the opposition amidst a huge cloud of steam as the pressure of that decade -and -a -half of domination was suddenly released. No one was quite willing to openly quote Chairman Mao Zedong’s infamous invitation to "let a hundred flowers bloom; let a hundred schools of thought contend”. But if someone had, then Labour’s policy-wonks would have known exactly what they meant.

And, 15 years ago, Labour still had some impressive policy-wonks in its ranks. Even before Clark’s reign came to an end, individuals such as Marion Hobbs, Helen Kelly, Jordan Carter and Liz Craig were making their presence felt on the policy front. With Clark’s departure, their ideas – a capital gains tax, GST off food, the reform of Working For Families – began to make serious headway. So much so that, in 2011, Goff, the former Rogernome, was required to front a Labour manifesto more radical than any seen since the 1970s.

With former Alliance activists like Jill Ovens and Len Richards now sporting Labour Party membership cards, something else was happening. In Clark’s day, dissidents who attempted to rouse the party’s annual conference to action on controversial policy challenges – such as the war in Afghanistan - found themselves surrounded by union heavies and hustled out of the building. Between 2008 and 2011, however, delegates peddling that old-time socialist religion could find themselves cheered to the echo during the annual conference’s plenary debates. The idea of rank-and-file democracy was staging something of a comeback.

Nowhere was this more in evidence than in the constitutional reforms setting up an electoral college to elect the party’s leader. Labour’s devastating loss in 2011 – it received just 27 per cent of the party vote – prompted Goff to step down from the leadership. Had the wishes of the rank-and-file been heeded, his replacement would have been the left-leaning David Cunliffe. The Labour caucus, however, had other ideas. It imposed Clark’s successor in Mt Albert, former UN aid bureaucrat David Shearer, upon the party. The party’s angry response was to claim – and win – the right to elect the party leader.

The response of Labour’s caucus to all this rank-and-file assertiveness anticipated by two years the response of the British Labour Party caucus’ Blairite majority to the membership’s choice of Jeremy Corbyn as leader in 2015. Cunliffe’s landslide win over Grant Robertson and Shane Jones in 2013 threatened neoliberalism’s ascendancy in the New Zealand Labour Party, a development to which the “Clarkist” faction of the party, led by Robertson, Chris Hipkins and Jacinda Ardern, was adamantly opposed.

As would later happen with Corbyn in the UK, Cunliffe found himself beset by a caucus majority that did not want was prepared to go to almost any lengths to undermine his leadership. Unsurprisingly, Labour’s performance in the 2014 election was even worse than its performance three years earlier. Cunliffe’s effort netted just 25 per cent of the party vote. At a post-election caucus meeting lasting several hours, it is reported that a distraught Hipkins tearfully begged Cunliffe to step down.

The Labour rank-and-file’s last gasp turned out to be Andrew Little, who defeated Robertson by the narrowest of margins. Little was able to impose a measure of discipline upon Labour’s faction-ridden proved singularly incapable of wringing significant support out of the nation’s voters. That job fell to Jacinda Ardern whose rise and fall has been, at once, the triumph and the tragedy of the past six years.

As is the case with just about every charismatic leader, Ardern’s political lustre cast the rank-and-file’s democratic project into the outer darkness of earnest irrelevance. All the centralising and top-down political approaches of the Clark ea were revived with a vengeance. Policymaking was, once again, the caucus’ preserve, and caucus was happy to leave it to Robertson, Hipkins, David Parker and Willie Jackson.

Ardern’s deft exit from the political stage, in favour of Hipkins, reduced that tight little pack of policy developers, effectively, to one. As the nation’s economic skies, darkened by the Covid crisis, stubbornly refused to clear, Hipkins opted to embrace political caution so tightly that not even Robertson and Parker, together, could persuade him to save both himself and his party with a bold display of fiscal progressivism.

So, here we are. Having led Labour to a defeat (28 per cent of the party vote) only marginally less devastating than Goff’s and Cunliffe’s, Hipkins has declined to follow their example. He will stay on as Opposition leader for the party’s sake, but the policy slate will be wiped clean. Presumably, Hipkins expects a hundred policy flowers to bloom from whatever it is that now covers the floor of Labour’s decaying edifice. But, if he’s expecting a hundred schools of thought to contend for the attention of himself and his colleagues, then he’s bound to be disappointed. Labour no longer has enough members to keep even a dozen policy schools going.

Fifteen years ago, there were the people and the ideological energy needed to set a policy debate in motion. Sadly, where that debate led the party was deemed by a majority of Labour’s ideologically inert caucus to be excessively innovative and much too spicy for the median voter’s taste. Hipkins and his Clarkist comrades remain as frightened of democratic socialism as they ever were, and 15 years on from Labour’s last loss of office, the rank-and-file have no idea what it is.

The policy drama that began in 2008 turned out to be a tragedy. The policy plays about to begin in 2024 can only be a farce.