Former National Party president Sue Wood at her home on Waiheke Island. Photo / Michael Craig
In her first in-depth interview since the dramatic events of 1984 when a drunken prime minister called a snap election, former National Party president Sue Wood is ready to talk.
The words will be engraved on her tombstone. “I was there,” Sue Wood says, with a rueful smile. “Brackets 1984.”
And there she is, in archive footage of that infamous night at Parliament when a slurring Robert Muldoon called the “schnapps” election with Wood, the National Party president, looking as though she’d rather be facing a firing squad than standing at the Prime Minister’s side.
Completely blindsided by his decision to act against her advice and go early to the polls, Wood’s heart must have sunk as the media pack closed in around them.
When Muldoon had come looking for her, she was in a private lounge off his office on the ninth floor, trying to find out how much was left in the party’s depleted campaign coffers.
“He was pretty drunk by then,” she recalls. “He said, ‘I need you now,’ and we went out of his office, down the corridor and straight into this media conference.
“It was full on. I was shell-shocked, really, but he needed the president by his side. And I had a job to do. I had to get on a campaign footing.”
In the first week, she didn’t run any newspaper ads. “Rob was furious. I told him there was no money. I thought, I’m not leaving the party heavily indebted. We will not win this election.”
Of course, Wood was right. A month later, on July 14, 1984, David Lange’s Labour Party swept National aside, triggering a radical ideological shift that still shapes New Zealand today.
Rolled as leader by Jim McLay, Muldoon and a coterie of his supporters turned on Wood viciously, blaming her for running a poor campaign.
Wood held her ground, not stepping down from the presidency until two years later, on the National Party’s 50th anniversary.
“I wasn’t going to leave a party that was carving itself up,” she says. “It’s a terrible thing to say, but it was a snake pit. You weren’t sure who you could trust.
“In 1986, I handed the party over in very good shape. But it did get pretty ugly.”
Much has been written about the events leading to that crucial election, which marked its 40th anniversary last year. However, Wood’s perspective has remained largely untold.
A feminist with outspoken views on issues such as abortion and matrimonial property rights, she was in her mid-30s when the National Party elected her as their first female president in 1982 – to the displeasure of its conservative wing, which backed a different candidate.
Just a few years younger than Wood, Marilyn Waring was then National’s sole female MP and already at war with Muldoon.
With the Government holding a slender one-seat majority, Muldoon cited Waring’s intention to cross the floor and vote with the Opposition on a nuclear-free New Zealand as forcing his hand on an early election.
In 2019, Waring published her autobiography, The Political Years, with a candid account of that tumultuous time. Now, she’s supporting Wood’s plan to write her own memoir,
“Sue was in a major breakthrough role, in incredibly trying circumstances, and she didn’t get pushed around,” says Waring.
“There’s a lot of commentary missing from that period in our history. Women’s voices need to be recorded, and she has an important story to tell.”
The feisty rogue MP and the pearl-wearing president may have seemed unlikely allies but Parliament was a lonely place for Waring, who was just 23 when she was first elected.
“For me to have another feminist woman to talk to, someone completely honest and discreet who I could ring and verbally knock my head against the brick wall, it filled a huge gap.”
Wood, who acted as a bridge between Muldoon and Waring, describes his behaviour towards the young MP as “very aggressive and cruel” on the night he announced the snap election.
With the Government flailing, was there any justification for Muldoon making a captain’s call to chance an early poll? “I would say the economy was the major issue and Marilyn was the best excuse.”
Now in her late 70s, Wood lives on Waiheke Island with her husband, Terry, and their ageing labrador, Valour.
Works by New Zealand artists line the walls of the house, which has a sweeping clifftop view back towards the city. Lizi, the younger of their two daughters, lives nearby.
Downstairs is what Wood calls “the bunker”, a storage room that doubles as a wine cellar. Archive material from her time in politics and beyond is stacked on the shelves and spills on to the floor. Distilling it all into a cohesive narrative for her memoir remains a daunting prospect.
“That’s all the international politics stuff,” she says, waving her hand at one corner of the room. “That’s me with the King of Spain, who turned out to be a right naughty man… But that’s not what I wanted to show you.”
Among her documents is the original copy of a letter she wrote to Muldoon at his request, dated February 14, 1984.
Outlining her discussions with five MPs (including Waring) who’d previously crossed the floor, she expresses confidence that the Government had their support on key issues and there was “no necessity” for an early election.
Muldoon refused to accept the letter, which has never previously been made public. “That’s history right there,” she says. “A bit of fact behind some of the stuff that’s been surmised.”
In the 80s, the role of party president carried more weight than it does today. Wood’s core responsibilities included control of the party finances, overseeing the selection of candidates and upholding the rules in the constitution.
“The parliamentary wing had no control over any of [those three areas],” she says. “It’s all different now.”
In his book The First 50 Years: A History of the New Zealand National Party, historian Barry Gustafson describes Wood as more intellectual in her approach to politics than her predecessors, acting with “precision, firmness and often good-humoured tact”.
A framed cartoon by the Herald’s legendary Gordon Minhinnick (retrieved by Wood from where it had slipped down behind a filing cabinet in the bunker) depicts Muldoon as a naughty schoolboy peering up at her as she wields a wooden spoon.
National Party conservatives, however, frowned on Wood’s high profile. Few backroom bureaucrats make the front cover of a women’s magazine, as she did in the New Zealand Woman’s Weekly after her election as president. “Power politics, plus home & family,” reads the headline. “How she will cope.”
Still, the former Auckland Star journalist, school teacher and national swimming champion has never been one to place herself at the centre of the story.
After stepping down in 1986, she quietly slipped out of the public eye, founding a corporate communications and public affairs consultancy in Wellington.
Operating largely behind the scenes, she worked on a series of weighty projects, including Transpower’s establishment as a State Owned Enterprise, advising the Treaty Tribes Coalition over the allocation of Treaty of Waitangi fisheries assets and managing its campaign against the Foreshore and Seabed legislation.
A founding signatory of the centre-right International Democratic Union, Wood remained engaged with global politics – dining at Downing Street with British PM Margaret Thatcher, and rubbing shoulders with US President Ronald Reagan’s vice-president, George Bush. (“I wouldn’t go near the Republicans now,” she says, with a shudder.)
As an international observer, she witnessed the overthrow of President Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, Nelson Mandela’s historic victory at the first democratic elections in South Africa, and the first elections after the assassination of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu.
The conditions she saw in Romania were devastating. “Empty markets, apart from a bit of pickled pork, and women with sallow faces and black teeth queuing for water. There was nothing. Yet they were having elections,” she recalls.
“I was in a village somewhere with a huge ballot box, the size of a walk-in doll’s house. When there was a power cut, the villagers poured in with candles. At the close of play for voting, they opened the box and threw all the ballot papers in the air.
“It didn’t tick all the [official] boxes, but they were so excited because they’d had an election and, after all the horrors, that meant everything.”
In the late 80s, husband Terry remembers her calling from Washington in the early hours one morning to tell him she was off to Northern Ireland to conduct a series of political training workshops for the Social Democratic Labour Party.
A few months earlier, two off-duty British soldiers had been killed in Belfast after taking a wrong turn and driving through an area controlled by the IRA. “He told me I was mad,” says Wood, “and to ring him back at a decent hour.”
Expect all that and more to be covered in her memoir, which Wood is still in the very early stages of writing. Her biggest regret is that she didn’t keep a diary during her years at Parliament.
“I was just so busy at the height of all the drama. And you’re so immersed in the moment that it’s only on reflection you realise it was momentous in the scheme of New Zealand politics.”
Given how sour their relationship turned after National’s election defeat and Muldoon’s ousting as leader, it might come as a surprise that he was initially one of Wood’s strongest supporters.
Wood, who found herself deeply moved at his funeral, viewed Muldoon as highly intelligent and politically astute.
“I think Rob realised the party had to move with the times. I represented change and a young female voice,” she says. “People paint this picture of a sort of ogre, but I only saw that in the later stages of his leadership.
“I remember Brian Talboys [Muldoon’s deputy from 1975 to 1981] saying to me, ‘Sue, when he goes, look out, he’ll have his arms around the pillar of the temple.’ And he was absolutely right.”
Wood’s gateway into centre-right politics was her marriage to Terry, a Putāruru farmer who was Waikato divisional chairman of the Young Nats. When she accompanied him to her first National Party conference, he moved a remit for homosexual law reform. “I was very impressed.”
The former Onehunga High School head girl had joined the Auckland Star as a teenage cadet in 1967, a time when women journalists were rare in the newsroom. On her first day, the chief reporter sent her down to the basement to clean the office cars.
While Terry worked the dairy farm in Lichfield, Wood taught at the local high school, had a six-month stint editing the Putaruru Press, and opened a swimming school; as a teenager, she’d held the national record in the 400m freestyle.
It was when they relocated to Auckland in the early 70s, with a toddler and a new baby in tow, that her focus on politics sharpened.
Completing the university degree she’d left unfinished, Wood became National’s women’s vice-president in 1977 and twice stood as the party’s candidate for Onehunga, making a decent show of it but losing to Labour’s Fred Gerbic both times.
By the time she took on the presidency in 1982, the powerhouse that had been the National Party was a diminished force, riven by internal divisions and declining membership.
An increasingly fractious Muldoon, by then in his third term of leadership, had also been steadily losing support. “It was a very divided party in a very divided caucus,” Wood says.
“You had the traditional loyalists in the Cabinet around Muldoon and then a real simmering of disquiet on the backbench. They knew the economic management was heading for disaster and they wanted to liberalise the economy.”
By 1984, with an election looming that November, National’s prospects of a fourth term were looking decidedly slim.
At a Dominion Executive meeting on June 13 – less than 48 hours before Muldoon called it – the party’s director-general, Barrie Leay, had listed all the marginal seats on a whiteboard, tagging with a skull and crossbones those he thought would be lost.
“The money wasn’t there, the members weren’t there,” says Wood. “And there was no way the party was anywhere near in shape to fight a successful campaign.”
Wood was back home in Auckland when Muldoon rang the following day to tell her Marilyn Waring had withdrawn from the caucus and all select committees.
“I asked if he wanted me to talk to her, because I was a conduit,” she says. “They didn’t communicate at all. He said, ‘No, I’m informing you as president’ and hung up.”
Scenting trouble, she flew straight back down to Wellington. “Remember, these were the days without cell phones. I just went on instinct.
“I didn’t take anything with me, and I remember I had to ring Terry to say I didn’t know when I’d be coming home and could he send some clothes?
“He emptied one of my drawers into a Kleensak, stapled it together and couriered it down. Good grief.”
In recent years, Wood has kept a fairly low profile, apart from a brief foray into local body politics as co-founder of the Auckland Future ticket, which fared poorly in the 2016 elections.
She’s currently chair of the oversight committee for the development of Western Springs, which would bring together Auckland Zoo and Motat in partnership with Ngāti Whātua and Tātaki Auckland, a project she’s excited about.
Four decades on from the juggernaut of 1984, Wood no longer recognises the party she dedicated so much of her life to. She describes the Government’s retrospective repeal of pay equity claims as an affront to democracy.
Not only has politics become more polarised, she says, but the centralisation of power has undermined the ability for people to have a genuine voice in parliament.
“That was a huge incentive to join a political party, not just for the cut and thrust of the policy debates but you had significant influence over government policy. And you had real power in selecting who your representative was.
“I’m affronted that half of the members of Parliament now are not accountable to real people and real electorates. That is not how democracy is meant to work.”
Looking back, Wood sees herself as a young woman at the crossroads of a generational shift in thinking. Given her progressive views, did she ever wonder whether she’d found herself in the wrong party?
“Well, there wasn’t much ‘left’ going on in Lichfield, Putāruru, I can tell you,” she says. “But no, no, I felt very comfortable [in National] then because it was such a broad church. There was room for all opinions and respect across the divide.
“I’d never call myself right-wing. And I would never call a friend who votes Labour left-wing. I don’t know where you’d put me politically now.”
Joanna Wane is an award-winning senior lifestyle writer with a special interest in social issues and the arts.