The 1984 election, 40 years ago this month, marked a momentous shift in direction for a country on the brink of bankruptcy. In this article, the final of a multi-part Listener series looking at the political upheaval and economic and social effects of Rogernomics that continue to define New Zealand, Mike Munro argues that we the Lange-Douglas government to thank for introducing spinners and fixers into the political mix to “control the narrative”. You’ll find part I here and part II here.
The whirlwind of economic change that came to be dubbed Rogernomics wasn’t the only revolution that unfolded in New Zealand politics in the 1980s. Equally transformational were the ways political management practices were modernised and the case for change was communicated and sold. Wellington’s political milieu hadn’t seen anything like it.
A number of steps to politicise and professionalise the ministerial workforce – especially the communications function, and media management more specifically – were taken soon after the David Lange-led government took office. Labour wanted strategic nous and politically “on-side” operatives in its ranks as it set about its work. Policy wouldn’t be its only priority. Messaging, market research, style and image would be getting just as much attention.
Long before the term spin doctor was coined, the domain of government communications was mostly non-partisan. Parliamentary press officers were career public servants from a standalone agency, the Tourist and Publicity Department. They were seconded to the offices of ministers, returning to the department when their secondment ended. They attended ministers’ announcements and arranged their media activity – in an admirably neutral fashion, of course.
Though there was a time when they had been outright propagandists. Wartime leader Peter Fraser had 26 information officers employed in the Prime Minister’s Department at Parliament. Their principal task was to shield New Zealanders from “alien influences”, particularly communism.
In his book All Shook Up, examining teenage subculture in New Zealand when anti-communist fever was rampant, Wellington author Redmer Yska writes that on taking office in 1949, the National government of Sid Holland wanted to clean up this “stink factory”. So, the information officers were banished from Parliament and relocated downtown to a quiet corner of the publicity division of the Department of Tourist and Health Resorts.
In 1954, this became the Tourist and Publicity Department, responsible for all government information and publicity programmes, including those of cabinet ministers. Its functions were folded into the Department of Internal Affairs during the Muldoon years, but the drill for providing ministers with communications support remained pretty much the same for 30 years.
Then the Lange juggernaut rolled into town. There was an immediate review of the employment arrangements that were being managed by the Parliamentary Service and Ministerial Services, the arm of the Department of Internal Affairs that looks after administrative support for ministers. The idea of applying a more political lens to the work of ministerial staffers emerged. It would mean having political appointees contracted directly to ministers and working in their political interests: in short, getting them re-elected.
Former television journalist and Labour Party PR supremo David Exel was commissioned by Lange’s chief press secretary, Ross Vintiner, to look at how the new regime would apply to press secretaries. Exel’s report expanded on the merits of having politically hands-on staff, freed from the constraints of public service rules of neutrality. It wouldn’t be compulsory to go on contract – press secretaries could remain part of the core public service if they wished. Cabinet gave the go-ahead and events-based contracts were soon being drawn up for those who wanted them. The pay was better, but the job certainly diminished.
“Events” that would trigger the end of the contract could be an election, or the minister to whom a staffer was contracted losing his or her cabinet post.
Rod Lingard, who joined then-housing minister Phil Goff’s office as an adviser in 1986, remembers it this way: “You were, in effect, a galley slave and you went down with the ship if the government was to, say, lose an election.” The Department of Internal Affairs was technically the employer, and therefore the paymaster. But the staffer’s minister represented the employer, via the contract.
On the same page
With a more political communications function came a slicker and better co-ordinated way of doing things. A communications advisory committee was formed under Vintiner and reported to the cabinet’s weekly meeting on ministers’ planned media activity – upcoming announcements, what speeches were to be made and the themes and messages that would inform them.
“The committee’s report would be discussed in cabinet, so everyone knew what was happening,” Vintiner says. “Ministers agreed that no cabinet decision would be made without consideration of how it was going to be communicated. Some of the reforms were monumental and we had to sell them well.
“That Labour government was a reaction to Muldoon. We had a fairly loose manifesto, so what was happening had to be carefully managed. What we did was huge, so much so that the Australian Labor Party followed us. It revised all its communications and based them on how we were doing it.”
It was arguably the dawning of the age of organised spin in Kiwi politics. Spinning – a moniker for all the techniques used to put the best possible gloss on information, or to denigrate your opponents – has always been part of the theatre of politics, always will be. Lange’s government became very accomplished at it during its first term. The office of then-finance minister Roger Douglas was the exemplars, regularly engaging with senior media figures and other influencers to shape opinion and mobilise support for the government’s policy ideas. It was about identifying who the “understanding” journalists were and keeping them well briefed.
Douglas’s economic adviser at the time, Geoff Swier, says there was a handful of journalists to whom the office got close. “There were only a few people who we felt were across the debates, like the Auckland Star’s Ian Templeton and Simon Collins from the Herald. [Douglas] would do the rounds of the press gallery and chew the fat with people like them.”
A wordsmith’s help
Another technique was the use of background or explanatory papers. These were generally written by Bevan Burgess, a chain-smoking former journalist who worked for Douglas as an adviser and analyst. Swier says he wrote the first draft of budgets and cabinet papers, but it was Burgess’s wordsmith skills that enabled Douglas’s game plan to be put into documents and communicated to people, Swier recalls. " [Burgess] was exceptionally good at it.” The in-vogue technology for quickly disseminating information was the facsimile machine, and Team Douglas had the fax lines pulsating as they pumped out explainers on what were sometimes very complex issues.
There was a lusty drinking culture at Parliament at the time. After-work drinks in ministerial suites were common, as were caucus room parties to which gallery journalists were welcomed. There was another setting, too, where the spinmeisters operated with a glass in hand.
An assortment of advisers, press secretaries and the odd minister would head to “3.2″, Bellamy’s staff bar (so called because of its location on the Beehive’s third floor) at dinner time, as they knew a gaggle of gallery journalists would habitually be there. It would be an opportunity to yarn and give a journalist a steer.
Speech-making was another important part of the Rogernomics hard sell. The troika of finance ministers – Douglas, David Caygill and Richard Prebble – were constantly fronting up to business and other sector audiences and delivering speeches that made the case for the policies they were championing. They were always relentlessly on message. This year, Prebble wrote in an opinion piece in the New Zealand Herald: “While doing the Rogernomics reforms we gave speeches every week explaining what we were doing and why.” He believed then, and still does, that it was the key to getting good media coverage, particularly in the early stages of a long list of major reforms.
Media pack
The media landscape was so different, more orderly compared with today. The spin doctors knew, and worked to, the daily or hourly deadlines of newspaper, radio and television journalists. The traditional media outlets were the only media outlets. Ministerial handlers didn’t have to deal with what digital technologies have created – a crescendo of 24/7 social-media noise, fuelled by an army of self-appointed political “experts”.
Redmer Yska, who joined health minister Michael Bassett’s office in 1985, remembers that the media then – before the fragmentation that has occurred in the digital era – was still quite cohesive, working as a pack on stories of the day. “And the 6pm [television] news dominated everything.”
Richard Harman, chief political correspondent for TVNZ during Lange’s tenure, observed another big change during Labour’s 1984 campaign: it was New Zealand’s first “photo opportunity” campaign, one designed primarily for television. Lange’s television appearances were carefully curated, which Harman feels was not surprising, given that Lange was getting his media advice from a former top-flight television interviewer, Simon Walker, and the perceptive Vintiner. The settings for important speeches, for example, were carefully chosen. So, when Lange set out Labour’s industrial relations policy – which Harman says was by no means pro-union – he did so at the Kinleith pulp and paper mill, which had been the scene of a bitter and protracted industrial dispute.
“There was a marked contrast between the Muldoon and Lange campaigns. Muldoon’s was a talking campaign designed largely for print and radio, the likes of formal speeches in halls and press conferences. Lange’s, on the other hand, was a visual exploration of New Zealand, jet boat rides, and visits to factories, hospitals and shopping centres. It was mostly pictures,” says Harman. Lange’s campaign became the template for how party leaders would campaign in the future, as we have seen in recent times.
Lange had experienced a personal transformation as well. In 1982, he underwent stomach bypass surgery. On becoming leader, he followed up by adopting more stylish glasses, ditching a suit that Bassett had likened to a “shabby horse cover” for something more fashionable, and getting his lank hair groomed. Future deputy prime minister Michael Cullen later recalled Lange’s makeover as the point at which “an image of slovenliness and of not caring was turned into the look of a man of stature”.
Polling was taken to a new and sophisticated level and Labour’s market research became part of an integrated communications strategy. Stephen Mills, later to carve out a stellar career as a political pollster on both sides of the Tasman, became an executive assistant to Lange, with a responsibility to collate and analyse all available relevant polling. It gave the government a greater awareness of public opinion on key reform issues and whether advertising campaigns were getting cut-through.
The Eyewitness News-Heylen and National Research Bureau polls were the main surveys in the 1980s, but there were lesser-known pollsters, too, who were conducting political research. “They were all happy to provide the prime minister’s office with fuller information than appeared in media stories, including demographics,” Mills recalls. For Lange and his ministers, it was gold.
No amount of spin
However, the Lange government would discover that valuable research data and slick political management aren’t the answer to everything when things start to go wrong. And go wrong they did. By late 1986, with Labour two years into its first term, stresses and strains were beginning to show.
Sweeping reforms to liberalise the economy were hurting key sectors, especially farming, the nation’s finances were still in a perilous state, the introduction of the goods and services tax GST had been plagued with problems, unemployment was high, business closures were mounting and, most critically, there was growing discontent inside government and party ranks over what was seen as a betrayal of Labour’s traditions. It would culminate in the calamitous infighting that erupted during Labour’s second term, leading to dysfunction and a resounding defeat at the 1990 election.
That caused the Rogernomics revolution to stall, but by then much of its work had been done. A protective cloak of subsidies and economic regulation had been torn away, and there would be no going back.
It was the same with political management. The locus of power had shifted from neutral public servants to a new class of apparatchiks – spinners and fixers whose job it is to keep things politically shipshape, to frame the debates, to control the narrative and to keep everyone on message. There would be no going back from that, either.
Mike Munro was a journalist in the parliamentary press gallery from 1984-94 and later worked for prime ministers Helen Clark and Jacinda Ardern.