From the archives: Today marks the 50th anniversary of the death of Norman Kirk. In this article from the Listener’s archives, Sally Blundell considers what might have been had Kirk not died in office in 1974. She spoke with veteran political reporter and former Listener deputy editor Denis Welch about Kirk’s legacy - and what contemporary NZ might have become.
Norman Kirk always was a man in hurry. He left school at 12. He worked on the railways, on the ferries, in a dairy factory and at the Firestone factory in Christchurch. He built his own house in Kaiapoi; he scoured the shelves of the local library.
In 1953, aged 30, he became the youngest mayor in the country when he won the Kaiapoi local elections. Four years later, he won the marginal seat of Lyttelton for the Labour Party, and in 1965, successfully contested the party leadership.
By 1972, he had lost weight, bought a better-fitting suit and grown out his short back and sides. He visited the small towns of New Zealand, winning the hearts and votes of “the little people of the country”, he later said, “the average families, the people who work in the factories and the farms, the manufacturers”.
In November that year, this large (over 1.8m tall) working-class man swept Labour into power after 12 years of National Party leadership. Over the next 90 weeks, writes Denis Welch in We Need to Talk About Norman: New Zealand’s Lost Leader, he tore into the business of government “as if there was no tomorrow”. He pivoted the country away from Britain and the US to face Asia and the Pacific. He introduced policies that catered to people in the regions, to pensioners, pacifists, young people (almost a quarter of a million people voted for the first time in 1972) and environmentalists.
But there really was no tomorrow. Kirk’s heart was playing up. While visiting India as prime minister, he had what appears to have been a stroke. What was almost certainly a heart turn came at the South Pacific Forum in Rarotonga in March 1974.
Back in New Zealand, he suffered a blood clot in his lung following an ill-advised double varicose vein operation. By the time he was admitted to the Home of Compassion in Wellington in late August 1974, his heart was enlarged by about 50%, only a third of one lung was working and his liver was swollen.
On the night of August 31, Kirk died while watching British TV series Softly, Softly: Taskforce from his bed. He was 51.
It was a wintry Wellington day, “pissing down with rain, cold as buggery”, said former Labour candidate David Shand, as thousands of mourners filed past a casket draped by a kiwi-feather cloak, the New Zealand flag, flowers, fronds, tapa cloths, a Black Power leather jacket and a wreath sent by Prince Philip.
The rain fell in Christchurch as people lined the streets from the airport to the town hall where Kirk’s body had lain in state overnight.
“It was miserable and it was sad,” said Labour Party regional secretary Ken Hastings, when Kirk was finally lowered into the sodden ground in Waimate.
Broad appeal
“Something passed away with the death of Norman Kirk,” writes Welch. “Something went out of New Zealand, never to return. With one brief exception, he was our last working-class prime minister; the last to know what true poverty was like. The last to give more weight to moral values, as opposed to monetary ones. The last to lead the country as if the government was a public service, not a commercial business.”
Welch, a veteran journalist, political commentator, former arts and books editor and deputy editor (twice) of this magazine, and, more recently, RNZ news bulletin writer and editor, missed it all. He heard the news of Kirk’s death on a BBC radio bulletin while driving through south London. He had fled the “stultifying” conservatism of New Zealand in the late 1960s, but during a trip back in the early 1970s, he recognised a transition.
“And Kirk was riding it,” he says from his home in Aro Valley, Wellington. “He represented the Labour tradition going back to Savage and Fraser, but he had such a capacious mind, such a mental reach, such a moral concept of the world that he was able to appeal to young people with ideas that were inconceivable at that time in New Zealand politics.”
Welch had completed his 2009 biography of former prime minister Helen Clark when he was approached by Margaret Hayward, a former neighbour of Kirk and later his private secretary and valued aide. Her Diary of the Kirk Years, published in 1981, gave a frank and personal insight into Kirk’s public and private life, but still she hoped someone would write the full biography.
Welch put his hand up. In 2014, after months of research, the planned biography hit a wall when David Grant released his biography The Mighty Tōtara: The Life and Times of Norman Kirk.
“In a way, that turned out to be the best thing that could have happened because it forced me to start thinking a lot more about Kirk and what he stood for, how he stood in relation to his time and what he might still have to tell us in our time,” says Welch. “So, the book began a long transformation from pure biography to what I suppose you might call an extended essay.”
The wonder year
The book lays out the scaffolding of Kirk’s life – his working-class background, his parents’ Salvation Army faith, the experience of the Great Depression, the impoverished family across the road who had to use timber yanked from the walls to build a coffin for the daughter who died of scarlet fever: “Kirk saw this from across the street,” writes Welch. “It struck deep.”
But the book focuses more on Kirk’s political philosophy and his views on the role of government, as manifested in his achievements during his brief term in office.
The year 1973 – bookended by Britain’s entry into the EEC in January and the first oil shock in October – was Kirk’s year of wonders, writes Welch. He farewelled HMNZS Otago to protest against French nuclear testing in the Pacific; scuttled plans to raise Lake Manapōuri; called off the planned Springbok tour knowing it would cost the party votes at the next election (it did).
He abolished compulsory military training, finalised the Accident Compensation Corporation, brought the Development Finance Corporation under full state control, and established a rent appeal board, the New Zealand Shipping Corporation, the domestic purposes benefit and an authors’ fund.
He supported the new state superannuation scheme promoted by junior cabinet minister Roger Douglas; he introduced new housing policies and expanded state housing. Pensioners were given an extra week’s benefit, then a 50% discount on TV licences and telephone rental charges.
He initiated the wildly radical Ohu scheme of state-subsidised, self-sufficient communes designed to help young people form kibbutz-like collectives on unused Crown land. They did not last long – the last, on the Whanganui River, folded 20 years ago – but are immortalised in Kiwi duo Ebony’s 1974 hit Big Norm.
Although he was seen to be slow to move on Māori issues, he gave statutory recognition to te reo, nearly doubled Māori Affairs funding, ensured Māori representation in cabinet, made Waitangi Day (he renamed it New Zealand Day) a national holiday, and set the wheels in motion for the creation of the Waitangi Tribunal – the first real evidence, writes Welch, “of an awakening Pākehā consciousness about the theft of Māori land”.
While colleagues enjoyed a summer break, he clambered into an air force Hercules for a bruising four-week tour of Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, India and Bangladesh. New Zealand, he assured an audience in Indonesia, no longer considered itself the Britain of the south “but the southernmost country of the Asia-Pacific region”.
Admired internationally
He shone on the global stage. After hearing Kirk’s address to the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Ottawa in 1973, Singapore’s leader Lee Kuan Yew relayed his admiration: “You have left a deep and abiding impression as someone who meant what he said, wanted to help, and was absolutely sincere.”
Paying tribute to Kirk after he died, then Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau said Kirk “possessed the genius to remind us that none of our activities, be they political or economic, are defensible unless they bring with them human benefit”.
Welch quotes former diplomat Gerald Hensley, “a man not really of the left at all”. Kirk, said Hensley, “left us feeling better about ourselves”.
“You can’t ask everything of a leader,” says Welch. “You can’t ask them to solve the world’s problems or even a country’s problems, but they can extend your imagination, your concept of what you are as a country and what you can do as a people. That a prime minister would use our own navy to send a protest ship to the nuclear testing site at Mururoa, or stand up to ban the Springbok tour at a time when the rugby ethos was far more pervasive in New Zealand – I talked to so many people who remember how proud they felt of New Zealand.”
Kirk was socially conservative. He didn’t respond to growing calls for homosexual law reform and better access to abortion; the infamous “dawn raids” began on his watch (he ditched them in the face of public backlash, but they were reintroduced by National’s Robert Muldoon). Nor did his government tackle deep-seated economic problems – even when the oil crisis struck, he insisted the party honour its election promises.
Then, as Welch’s subtitle suggests, he was lost. Lost in the sense that, once his body was laid in the ground, the country quickly forgot him.
Pools, rest homes, reserves and an education scholarship carry his name, but there are no statues, no memorials, no institutions named in his honour; history books, writes Welch, do not dwell on him. In the face of growing inflation, the oil shocks, Britain’s entry into the EEC and massive social changes as young people experimented with different lifestyles, Kirk’s death, says Welch, seemed to add to the instability: “not only was the ship of society being tossed by the waves but the captain had left the bridge”.
But lost, too, in the sense that during his brief period as prime minister, we never quite grasped the “whole sense of him”.
“It is often the way for leaders who are out of the usual mould – [David] Lange is another example, we never quite ‘got’ him and I don’t think he ever quite got us. And, of course, [Jacinda] Ardern – she tried to be someone different as a politician and won our hearts for a while, but I’m sorry to say, as time goes on, we start to feel uncomfortable with people like that. I think it’s a small country thing.”
The road to Rogernomics
The title of his book – a riff on Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin – speaks with a journalistic urgency. Kirk’s style of government, his humanitarianism and “big heartedness”, says Welch, should be remembered, “not least because much of what he stood for has since been wantonly undone”. Now, he says, “anything pre-1984 seems like another country”.
The 1975 election returned the National Party to power under Muldoon. Like Kirk, he led a centrist, social democratic, state capitalist-type government dominated by one man. But Muldoon’s iron personality and bullying tactics gave the Keynesian welfare state such a bad name, writes Welch, “that the subsequent political reaction was far more extreme than might otherwise have been the case”.
Perhaps that reaction, that wave of what Thomas Piketty calls “hypercapitalism” sweeping across Thatcher’s Britain and Reagan’s America, would have been impossible to avoid. As in those countries, Rogernomics ushered in a programme of deregulation, asset sales, trade liberalisation and globalisation.
Would it have been different had Kirk remained in power for six or nine years? Could he have tempered the free-market ethos that has become so deeply embedded in so many countries? Counterfactual histories, agrees Welch, are a rabbit hole, “but I think he would have moderated it – I don’t think we would have had the radical switch to Rogernomics that we got had he preceded it.”
He describes Labour’s 30,000-word election manifesto, never far from Kirk’s side. “It was a debt of honour that had to be paid; Lange’s was an albatross that had to be shot.”
Broken contract
Welch wears his politics on his sleeve. He stood twice for Parliament, for both the Values and the Green parties. On his blog, Opposable Thumb, he has railed against the way a business mentality has permeated “every level of society since the recrudescence of market liberalism”.
But his book is a reminder of how governance has changed, how that near-mythical and much-debated social contract, by which citizens give legitimacy to political authority to uphold the common good, has been broken. In Kirk’s day, he writes, there was daylight between government and the business world.
“Of course, they overlapped in many respects, but government clearly had a moral purpose, a function that the worlds of finance, business and commerce could not and did not supply. Not all of its actions needed to generate a financial profit or produce an ‘efficient outcome’.”
With his manifesto at his side, he says, “Kirk tried to take us somewhere where we hadn’t been, and we went along with him some of the way and we might have gone a lot further had he lived, but he didn’t. So that remains an open-ended story.”
We Need to Talk About Norman: New Zealand’s Lost Leader, by Denis Welch (Quentin Wilson Publishing, $39.99), is out now.
This article was first published in the NZ Listener on 4 July, 2023.