Oxford pays the bill for Mr Lange’s trip

Press, 12 March 1985, Page 6

Oxford pays the bill for Mr Lange’s trip

PA Wellington The Prime Minister, Mr Lange, has made his own contribution to reducing New Zealand’s deficit—by getting the Oxford University’s debating club to foot the bill for much of his trip to Europe last week. He laughed off last weekend’s criticism by Lady Olga Maitland in London’s “Sunday Telegraph” that the expenses for his trip—during which he visited officials of the Reagan Administration, the Queen, the British Prime Minister, Mrs Thatcher, and the Prime Minister of Singapore, Mr Lee Kuan Yew—should have been financed by the New Zealand Government. The article said that when Mr Lange accepted the Oxford Debating Society’s invitation to debate on nuclear weapons with a Right-wing American politician, he also accepted its offer to pay his first classair fare, ?4500. Mr Lange said last evening that other expenses brought the actual amount

to nearly double that. “This aristocratic woman, Lady Maiting-someone-or-other has not only made a claim-I’ve actually said what we did, and it was far more than ?4,500. “It was $8,920. “I asked for it, and I also got hotel expenses in Oxford,” he said. “I am totally unrepentant and I will do it again. “This is the first time New Zealand has had a Prime Minister who hasn’t always been a burden on the taxpayer when he travels

overseas,” he said. The debating society had made “an awful lot” of money out of his appearance said Mr Lange. “They sold television rights because I went there, and they actually made a very large sum of money,” he said. “They are verygrateful to me for having done that.” In London, the debating society’s president, Mr Roland Rudd, said, “I suppose we were so delighted to get him that we didn’t mind too much.”