Matt McCarten

Matt McCarten
4th Leader of the Alliance
In office 2003–2004
Preceded by	Laila Harré
Succeeded by	Jill Ovens & Paul Piesse
Personal details
Born	1959
Political party	Labour (2013-)
Other political affiliations	Labour (1978-89) NewLabour (1989-91) Alliance (1991–2004)

Matthew "Matt" McCarten (born Dunedin, 1959) is a New Zealand political organiser, of Ngāpuhi descent. He has been involved with several leftist or centre-left political parties, and is also active in the trade-union movement. He wrote a weekly column for the Herald on Sunday from 2010 until 2014. He suffers from liver cancer which is likely to be fatal.

McCarten, who had been a member of the Labour Party since he was nineteen, became dissatisfied with the party's direction under Minister of Finance Roger Douglas. Douglas was a strong promoter of free-market economics and deregulation, which McCarten and others saw as a betrayal of Labour's roots. Eventually, one of Labour's MPs, Jim Anderton, broke away to found NewLabour, and McCarten became the president of the new organisation. NewLabour later joined with several other parties to form the Alliance – McCarten became president of this new party as well.

After the 1999 elections, the Alliance became the junior partner in a coalition government with Labour (which had now moved away from its programme of economic reforms). However, some members of the Alliance, including McCarten, felt that their grouping had made too many concessions to the more centrist Labour, and that the Alliance was abandoning its left-wing principles. Eventually, a rift developed between McCarten (serving as the Alliance's organisational leader) and Jim Anderton (serving as its political leader) – the party's governing Council backed McCarten, but most of its MPs backed Anderton.

After a long and bitter dispute, Anderton and his supporters left the Alliance to found the Progressive Party in 2002, leaving McCarten's faction in control of the Alliance.

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