It may seem a strange thing to say, but I reckon you can trace the progress of neoliberalism in New Zealand through the political career of Jim Bolger. The man was a living litmus test of how this ideology has affected us since the 1980s.
Until the mid-80s, Bolger was a typical representative of the National Party as it had functioned for pretty much its entire existence. (In fact, born in May 1935, he was virtually the same age as the party, which was founded the following year.) That’s to say, he believed in a moderate form of capitalism in which the forces of business and finance lived in more or less comfortable association with the state: a so-called “social contract” allowed all sides (including trade unions, much more powerful then) to co-operate in running a country that was far less unequal and divided than it is now.
As Minister of Labour in the late 70s and early 80s, Bolger used to take part in negotiations over industrial disputes, sitting down with employers and union representatives. Ministers did that then. It’s a sign of how far we’ve moved from the interventionist state model that the very idea of a cabinet minister taking part in industrial negotiations these days would cause palpitations from the top of the Beehive to the bottom.
Bolger was, in short, a social democrat, as indeed were most politicians of any party up to 1984. And in truth, he remained one through to the end of his parliamentary career in 1998. But the world around him changed dramatically in the 80s, and he was smart enough to realise that if he was to survive and succeed in politics, he had to bend with the wind. (Helen Clark did the same.)
What happened first was that National was swept out of office in the 1984 snap election and had to sit and watch as the new Labour government and its finance minister Roger Douglas implemented an economic agenda that even the most ardent right-wing Nat would have hesitated to put forward: agricultural subsidies stripped away, government departments and agencies converted into state-owned enterprises or privatised, import tariffs reduced or removed, overseas competition welcomed with open arms …
National faltered and wavered. For a couple of years, it appeared to totally lose its centre-right mojo. Under new leader Jim McLay it even felt compelled to oppose the introduction of GST – something a National government would normally have cheerfully done in the fullness of time. Playing off the initials, McLay first lambasted it as a “gestapo tax”, before amending this to “great socialist tax” and eventually to “greedy socialist tax”. Other National frontbenchers went along with this for a while but you could see their hearts weren’t in it.
Once Bolger had toppled McLay for the leadership in March 1986, he judged correctly that his party couldn’t go on pretending. He didn’t exactly support Rogernomics with unstinting praise but in a speech later that year to manufacturers twitchy about the reforms, he said bluntly, “The old order of a fortress mentality or a totally protected environment is gone, and we’re not heading back to it.”
He said this, I might add, in a rather laborious, uninspiring way. Speech-making was never Bolger’s strong point; rhetorical flourishes knew him not. He seemed to stab at words and phrases like a farmer prodding a haybale with a pitchfork. His expression on such occasions, I wrote at the time, “is so unvarying he makes Clint Eastwood look like Cyndi Lauper”. There was very little physical movement, either; with him, turning a page of his speech notes was a flamboyant gesture.
Malapropisms
In his oratorical struggles, Bolger also tended to generate malapropisms and mixed metaphors. Once, referring to something or other expected to happen, he distinctly observed that people were “waiting with bated breasts”. He urged National Party conference delegates to start “thrinking through” the issues and made “no apology for taking the duff, uh, tough decisions we have.” And I saw him give a speech somewhere in which he warned alarmingly that there were “dark crowds on the horizon”.
Several commentators also noticed his tendency to adopt the accent of the foreign leader he’d just been talking to, be it Nelson Mandela or Bill Clinton.
But none of this prevented him from rising more or less effortlessly (helped by the Lange government’s gaping internal divisions in the late 1980s) to the prime-ministership in 1990. And he came to power promising to heal the wounds inflicted by Rogernomics. I’m not sure when or how he acquired the sobriquet “The Great Helmsman” (by which Mao Zedong had been known) but it may have been because of a certain formidable quality suggestive of riding out storms and keeping one’s head while others ran shrieking for the lifeboats.
Despite facial features that had him unkindly likened to a potato, there was an unflappable solidity about him; sometimes in public he brought to mind the American entertainer Will Rogers, who used to tell drawn-out homespun yarns while phlegmatically twirling a rope.
Bolger once told a National Party conference, “We are the party that all New Zealand can feel comfortable with” – and that one sentence supplied a complete manifesto. The Great Helmsman stepped onto the bridge of the good ship Long White Cloud with the clear hope, if not intention, of governing in the way his mentor Keith Holyoake had. The slogan he bore was “The Decent Society”.
Fat chance. The neoliberal revolution unleashed by Douglas was still in full swing; it had penetrated the public service, entrenched itself in law and been embraced by the captains of industry and commerce. A piddling thing like a change of government wasn’t going to stop it so easily, no matter what the new government’s leader wanted. Like it or not, Bolger had to front a neoliberal economic agenda driven by his party’s answer to Douglas, Ruth Richardson.
In the normal course of things, his old mate Bill Birch would have become finance minister but these were not normal times. Richardson had become too powerful to be ignored – when Bolger took over as leader in 1986 she came within one vote of winning the deputy leadership, and to keep his caucus united, he had to make her finance spokesperson. Now she had power and didn’t waste time wielding it, most notoriously with her self-titled “Mother of all Budgets” in 1991.
Middle of the road
No one was comfortable with that mother, least of all Bolger. But he had to pretend that he and Richardson were ideologically joined at the hip when, in fact, his instinctive approach to government was a much more middle-of-the-road one. In the early 1990s, he personified the conflict between the old social-democratic way of doing things (another of his favourite slogans was “the politics of inclusion”) and the new drive towards purging, purifying and the political equivalent of colonic irrigation.
As soon as “decently” possible he got rid of the colourful Richardson as finance minister and replaced her with the colourless Birch – who was indistinguishable from the wallpaper most of the time – and together they negotiated the turbulent economic waters of the 90s. Despite their natural political instincts, honed in the more homely 70s, the temper of the times forced them to work with and around the neoliberal agenda; it can’t be forgotten that under Bolger’s watch the state housing system was gutted, market rents were introduced, foodbanks appeared on the scene for the first time, and working-class power was crushed by the Employment Contracts Act.
Bolger tried to explain this away in Parliament once by quoting John Kenneth Galbraith – “Politics is a choice between the disastrous and the unpalatable” – to which Labour’s Richard Prebble rather cruelly responded: “So why are you doing both?”
Much of this brutalist style of government ran counter to the ethos of the old National Party, which explains the breaking away of Winston Peters and the formation of New Zealand First; it also explains why King Country-farmer Bolger, who presided over all this, still managed to avoid coming across as a flinty cost-cutter and union-smasher.
Mud didn’t stick to his fatherly, steady-as-she-goes persona; strikingly, what he is most remembered for now are the major treaty settlements he and Doug Graham pioneered. Here he found his metier, “bringing people together”, as he liked to say, rather in the way he would have brought the cows together for milking when he was 9 or 10. Perhaps only someone of his style and background could have won over most Pākehā to this radical recognition of wrong.
But he just wasn’t flinty enough for the next generation of National MPs, who put him out to grass in the back paddock (ambassadorship in Washington DC) and flinted their way to defeat under Jenny Shipley in 1999.
What is striking about Bolger is how freely he expressed his opinions once that ambassador stint was over, pronouncing at times the death of neoliberalism, railing against inequality and seeing opportunities for a more “imaginative” form of capitalism – probably one not too unlike the social democracy that anyone born between 1935 and 1985 grew up in.
Under Clark’s government he chaired New Zealand Post and served in other roles that reflected his idea of this country as a decent, co-operative place to live. His shifting views – or rather, the re-emergence of his original views – also reflected a public shift away from hard-nosed neoliberalism, at least until a couple of years ago.
Equally striking is the way his leadership is almost fondly remembered by citizens of every stripe: not many prime ministers leave such a legacy. He was by no means wildly popular in office – not surprisingly, given that all the usual norms had been upset by Rogernomics, Ruthanasia, MMP and a rash of party rebellions and breakaways.
But what survives of him in the collective memory is the sense of his being essentially a good man. If you can come out of 25 years of top-level politics with that as your epitaph, you haven’t done too badly at all. l
Denis Welch was the Listener’s political columnist from 1984-92.