The 1984 election, 40 years ago this month, marked a momentous shift in direction for a country on the brink of bankruptcy. This article is the first in a multi-part Listener series looking at the political upheaval and the economic and social effects that continue to define New Zealand 40 years on. Here, Denis Welch considers the leadership of David Lange who, he says, despite his charisma was in many ways an unlikely prime minister who struggled to rein in Roger Douglas’s radical agenda.
I was at the Christchurch Town Hall on the evening of Tuesday, June 26, 1984, when the Labour Party launched its campaign for the election, due on July 14. With Labour having been in opposition for nearly nine years, if ever a campaign opening had certain victory stamped all over it, this was it.
There could be little doubt in the mind of anyone at the launch that the party would sweep into office three weeks later. The National government had run out of steam; it had all the electoral appeal of a boiled turnip. Its leader, Sir Robert Muldoon, who doubled as finance minister (an accretion of power unthinkable now), had increasingly been running the economy like his personal fiefdom, while souring the country with his abrasive, combative style.
In any case, he had virtually acknowledged his impending defeat by awarding himself a knighthood in the previous New Year’s Honours, knowing full well a subsequent government would never confer one on him.
Labour leader David Lange, by contrast, looked fresh, bright and unsoiled by mucky old politics. A generation younger than Muldoon, he was an ebullient man with an infectious, oratorical style, full of booming wit and good humour. Fired up by some stomping music, the crowd of more than 2000 gave him a tumultuous reception. He rewarded them (and the TV audience) with a speech full of motherhood-and-apple-pie promises intended, apparently, to heal the wounds inflicted by National and restore the country’s purpose, dignity and respect.
It was, as I wrote at the time, a high-powered combination of platitudes and utopian rhetoric. But it hardly mattered what he actually said; the thing was, he looked indisputably like a winner, and that was all his party needed.
He looked even more like a winner two weeks later when he demolished Muldoon in a TV debate. Muldoon, whose aggressive ways had made him seem larger than he was over the previous nine years, suddenly looked like he actually was: a small, ugly, rather toad-like man unable to convey a sense of vision or even generosity of spirit.
Toad vs teddy bear
Facing the 127kg Lange, he seemed to shrink even further into his seat. “Television was good to me,” Lange later acknowledged. “I was large. I was confident. I was reassuring. I was a teddy bear.” Teddy bear versus toad? No contest. Exit Muldoon, stage right, though he lingered on for seven years as an MP, moonlighting as a talk-show host and narrating a stage production of The Rocky Horror Show. He even did the Time Warp, which some would say was perfect casting.
As the Listener’s political columnist in the press gallery over the next few years, I got to see a lot of Lange close up. He was strikingly unlike any other prime minister this country has ever had.
For a start, he had an unnerving yet disarming way of talking himself down. Though he could rise magnificently to the occasion when major developments demanded it, he also made a habit of not taking himself entirely seriously. Socialising after his campaign launch speech in Christchurch, he was told by then-political correspondent for TVNZ Bill Ralston that, at 25 minutes, the speech had exceeded the normal attention span. “Yes,” grinned Lange, “I started to lose interest myself.”
He often took risks with the role he was traditionally supposed to play as the nation’s leader, saying things he knew he shouldn’t, disobeying his minders, resisting the “statesman” image lest he be locked into it. His famous participation in the Oxford Union debate about nuclear weapons upset the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which feared diplomatic repercussions.
Unlike most politicians who claw their way to the top, Lange also had zero interest in lobbying his colleagues, whether for himself or for a political plan. He left others to do the number-crunching, manoeuvring and outright bullying required to procure a caucus or cabinet majority for some contentious policy. “I never had the temperament for that side of politics,” he admitted in his autobiography, My Life. Notably, among this country’s prime ministers, he kept no kitchen cabinet to kick ideas around with.
The truth is that he wasn’t really a politician in the accepted sense of the word. Nor, for that matter, was his deputy, Geoffrey Palmer. Both were lawyers who’d catapulted into national politics by winning by-elections. (In Lange’s case, ironically, it was a by-election triggered by Muldoon’s character assassination of the seat’s previous MP, Colin Moyle; in other words, Muldoon opened the political door to the man who would eventually oust him from office.) Nor had Lange ever been a party activist, doing the hard yards at branch and committee meetings; he didn’t come up through Labour’s ranks, as, say, Mike Moore, Helen Clark and Phil Goff did.
Above all, though, he did not appear to be driven by any clear, consistent belief system. He just seemed to want to make the world a nicer, kinder place (not an ignoble aspiration by any means, but it does need hard graft).
I was once sitting beside him at the back of the hall during a Labour Party conference in Ōtara and, as delegate after delegate declared their unswerving commitment to sacred policy A or noble cause B, he looked wonderingly towards them and said: “You know, there are people here who believe things.” The closest he came to a political philosophy was in his book when he wrote: “I wanted to do something for the people who had voted for us. I wanted to make the law more humane. Having acquired an interest in foreign policy, I wanted New Zealand to be a voice for good in the world.”
Ironically (yes, there’s more irony), it may have been precisely because Lange and Palmer weren’t your usual kind of politicians that finance minister Roger Douglas was able to drive through his radical policies under their (nominal) leadership. Had Lange been more hands on, Rogernomics might not have slipped the leash as it did.
But circumstances had thrust Lange on to the stage to play the king when he probably would have been better off as the prince. After its third election defeat in a row, in 1981, Labour needed a more inspirational leader than the self-effacing Bill Rowling, and Douglas and his cohort needed a robust extrovert to soften the pain of their economic programme – Lange met the job specifications. Poor sap.
It probably hastened his premature end – he died aged just 63 in 2005. But as David Shearer and Todd Muller well know, when a party desperate for an electable leader taps your shoulder and says, “You next,” it’s almost impossible to refuse: you just have to hope the timing is lucky for you. In their cases, it wasn’t; in Lange’s, it was … for a while. Then it very much wasn’t.
Selling rogernomics
Lange, in effect, was the salesman for Rogernomics; the barker outside the right-wing revival tent. He more or less acknowledged this in his book: “I believed that Douglas, alone of the caucus, would enable Labour to reshape itself as a modernising party which could actually do something for the country. We needed fire and he provided it.” And if some of Douglas’s policies were less popular or less successful? “I had to sell the offal as well as the T-bone.”
This was all very well for the first couple of years or so in government. Douglas and associates such as Richard Prebble exuded such energy and drive, they were so commandingly clear about what they wanted to achieve that their momentum was irresistible – especially as Treasury supplied the rocket boosters.
Lange later admitted that Treasury’s arguments had an “intellectual coherence” that other departments could hardly ever match, and that most ministers were overwhelmed by it: “I cannot remember any serious sustained discussion in Cabinet of the human costs of our economic policy,” he wrote.
Uh, what? And this was a Labour government, supposedly warm and caring and kind to little children? Here, you have precisely the reason subsequent Labour governments have seemed less than unswerving about their historical commitment – the reason Labour was founded – to workers, the poor, the casualties of capitalism. Douglas knocked all that sideways, and Labour, it can be argued, has never fully recovered.
Lange’s government also got endless mileage out of saying Muldoon had left the country in such a dire state that he had forced their hand. Nothing less than a bulldozer was needed to clear the mess away. Thus was the creation of something called a “level playing field” justified.
But it became fairly clear early on that the playing field sloped in favour of big business and foreign money, while the rest of New Zealand got trampled in the ruck. Thousands were thrown out of work, inflation soared, some communities were torn apart, and state assets built up over decades were flogged off while institutional knowledge, such as that of Forest Service staff, most of whom lost their jobs, was deemed worthless.
End to ‘macho approach’
Finally, it dawned on Lange that Douglas wasn’t going to stop. Some months before the 1987 election, he became aware that his finance minister had even more radical plans for reform, including an unprecedented flat tax, under which everyone would pay the same rate – eventually 15%. This could not help but make the rich richer and the poor relatively poorer.
Though Lange had always known Douglas could be obstinate, he now came to see him as a fundamentalist, even a zealot. The party – and the country – had certainly needed a shake-up but Douglas was coming on less like a new broom, more like a suction pump.
Thus the momentous Beehive press conference of Thursday, January 28, 1988, at which, unusually meek and mild, bluster-free for once, Lange publicly rejected what he called his own government’s “macho approach” and announced – without consulting colleagues, least of all Douglas, who was out of the country at the time – that the flat tax would not go ahead as planned.
And it didn’t. But this single announcement precipitated the downfall of the Labour government, which splintered and split on its way to a crushing election defeat in 1990. By this time, Lange had stepped down as PM and Douglas had left Parliament, before leaving Labour altogether and co-forming the Act Party.
Lange may not have been super-clear about what he believed in but he knew what he didn’t believe in, and what he didn’t believe in was what by then had come to be called Rogernomics.
On that day in 1988, the teddy bear growled, knowing it would almost certainly cost him his own job but that he could no longer live with himself if he simply lay down and let the bulldozer roll on. It was a far, far better thing than he had ever done, and an unforgettable act of political courage.
Equally unforgettable is Lange’s recollection years later that, when Douglas originally put his flat-tax package to the cabinet, only he (Lange) and Michael Cullen voted against it. “Dear God!” wrote Lange about the other ministers. “What a terrible lot of people they were. It is hard to believe I used to think so much of them.”
You can never completely excuse Lange’s political woolliness but if he was somewhat overwhelmed by events, then he wasn’t alone.
Writing an obituary on him for this magazine in 2005, I concluded that, “For five extraordinary years, David Lange was us – torn between the old and the new, headily excited by economic change, nervously aware of social damage, glass of chardonnay in one hand, cup of tea in the other. For that reason, if no other, he was one of our most remarkable prime ministers.”
Even in the very act of relinquishing the prime-ministership in August 1989, and handing his resignation to the governor-general, he admitted his unsuitability for the role. “I’m going to go to Government House this afternoon,” he said, “and come back liberated. This country will be liberated, too.”