How the P.M. undermined my boss Roger Douglas

Press, 19 December 1988, Page 20

How the P.M. undermined my boss Roger Douglas

Bevan Burgess, now privately employed by the former Finance Minister, tells of the turmoil behind the scenes this year in the Beehive

AS A YOUNG journalist covering politics for the “Auckland Star” in 195766, I used to wonder naively what really went on behind the facade that Ministers and their staff present to the news media. In the next dozen years, I taught journalism, became manager of press and public relations services for the International Wool Secretariat in London, then ran the New Zealand Wool Board’s textile advertising and publicity service. After that, as a hot-shot consultant, I directed the P.R. of the bread industry, the milk industry, General Motors, Dunlop, N.Z.M.C. and a few other big corporations for Wellington’s largest P.R. consultancy. In December 1984, I decided to step through the looking glass, and answer the question which had puzzled me 20. or 30 years before, as a young reporter, when Walter Nash and Keith Holyoake were Prime Ministers. I joined Roger Douglas as his senior press secretary. For the first time in 30 years, we had a Government doing things that made sense to me, and Roger Douglas was the man driving that machine.

By then, the list of top people I had worked with was a long one. I have the experience to know when a boss is a professional of world class. Roger Douglas is a professional of world class. He’s good. If what I say about him sounds like praise, well, I have worked at one time or another with people from 30 countries. I am 56 years old. I have earned the right to make those judgments. Many people outside the Beehive imagine an autocrat who does not hesitate to steamroller his way over any opposition that stands in his path, not caring who gets crushed. True, he does not tolerate fools gladly, particularly self-interested fools. He gathers good people round him, listens, picks their brains, and motivates them to work one-and-a-half times round the clock.

He believes in excellence. With 20 Treasury officers round his table in think-tank sessions, he always watches the expressions on the faces of the young ones at the back, to see if they agree with their seniors. If he wakes up in the night, he writes notes to himself, to keep his head clear about tomorrow’s action. On aeroplanes, he writes down his real objectives, and messages about how to achieve them.

When new problems arise, he worries at them like a dog with a bone, until he works out what he wants to achieve. As soon as he has defined his goal, he relaxes totally — and works non-stop to achieve it.

He has a meticulous respect for the Cabinet process: “If I can’t convince 20 other Ministers in a fair argument, there is no way I am going to convince 2 million voters. Ideas deserve to be tested.”

Every recommendation he has made in the last four years went to the Cabinet for decision. He marshals his arguments thoroughly. He cares about every word in his Cabinet papers. He

doesn’t mince words either. “You have to be up-front with people, and tell it like it really is. That’s what people respect. They want you to be straight with them. Play it by the book. Don’t put any spin on the ball.” He finds it perfectly normal that his ideas should be hashed around, amended, modified, even rejected entirely by his colleagues. “If they don’t think they can sell it, they are probably right,” he says.

“But don't sell New Zealanders short. They’re not stupid. They want answers that will last — not something that helps tomorrow, then hurts for the next three years or 10 years. They like you to face up to things.” That attitude shows up in a practical way when he reads public-opinion polls. Some surveys say, for example, that a majority of women want change to slow down or stop. The Prime Minister’s advisers take that literally.

Roger Douglas says: “That’s nonsense. Women don’t want change to make it worse — but they do want us to make it better. You have to think about people’s real underlying interests when reading poll results.

“You have to take more account of what people will need tomorrow, than what they want today.” If Roger Douglas gives his word on an undertaking, you can bank on his keeping it. These personal attitudes of the former Finance Minister have been a continuing source of conflict with the Prime Minister. The P.M. has, for example, repeatedly given Roger assurances — on which Roger acted. Then after the action was committed and irretrievable, David Lange has pulled the rug out from under his own Finance Minister’s feet, by going back on the assurance, leaving Douglas to flounder in public. Typically, the Prime Minister’s

media machine has then moved swiftly to plant the idea that Douglas was the person at fault. That interpretation, often unsourced, was then published across the nation.

Douglas’s sense of honour and loyalty to the Cabinet ethic invariably bound him. Until this week, he never once revealed — nor did his staff — the broken undertakings which had caused such problems. Douglas has, for a year, been universally blamed, through the initiative of the P.M.’s media machine, for bulldozing his famous December 17 package through Cabinet against Mr Lange’s own wishes. Until this week, Douglas kept the secret that on December 16, three times over, he suggested deferring the announcement to talk right through anything still worrying the P.M. The P.M. rejected that offer. He did more than that. He gave Douglas and two other Ministers his assurance that he would come back early from his holidays, at the beginning of January, to help sell the package to the public. Acting on that assurance, the Government published the package. The P.M. did not promote it in January. He came back and wrote letters to Douglas expressing renewed doubts. By then, Douglas had new work running through the computers using refined analytic techniques capable of proving the package would do even more — for more people — than he had originally believed. The P.M. was working off an earlier analysis which, Douglas knew, seriously exaggerated the number of people who would lose under the new system. And it understated the winners. Committed to major engagements overseas which he could not cancel, Douglas went personally to Lange, and sought an assurance that decisions would not be taken until he got back to present the new figures.

Lange gave it willingly. They even discussed possible dates and times for the meeting on Douglas’s return. Six days later, ignoring that assurance, Lange went public without warning or consultation.

Douglas, on the other side of the world, did not know it was happening until a phone call from a journalist woke him at 2 a.m. to tell him his proposals to help low-income families were now a dead letter.

Douglas had no idea on earth how to handle that situation. He had been let down completely after acting on assurances by his own Prime Minister. The rules of the game forbade him to reveal the assurances.

That is a cruel situation for any Minister to find himself in. It was not helped when the Lange media machine moved into high gear, promoting unsourced interpretations nation wide that it

was Douglas’s own fault. The message was quietly circulated that Douglas had bulldozed the package through against Lange’s wishes, and the finance wizard had not even bothered to get his facts and figures right before doing so. By going over the top in public, instead of working through the Cabinet routine, Mr Lange gave the whole nation a message that his Finance Minister no longer had the trust of the Prime Minister.

From that point on, nobody in the country knew when the P.M. might act unilaterally again, to overturn some other aspect of agreed policy which everyone had previously believed to be stable and secure.

Once a Finance Minister is placed in that position, he can no longer do his job of using his authority to underwrite the assurance that good Governments have to give, about the stability of their policies. From that point on, the fundamental bulwark against economic and political uncertainty — which always had been Douglas’s authority, not the Prime Minister’s — had been removed. The costs started to add up.

Through the first couple of major crises engineered to bring further discredit on Roger Douglas, interest rates did not rise. They simply stopped falling, though inflation was declining fast. The real cost of borrowing, to householders and businesses, widened rapidly. The sacking of Prebble from his S.O.E. portfolio, virtually without bothering to pretend justification, accelerated the process. That signalled that friendship with Roger and allegiance' to his economic strategy had become a dangerous occupation. My own sacking, after a well-promoted smear campaign, proved just how dangerous.

Roger Douglas had been given an assurance by David Lange and Geoffrey Palmer two days before he had to leave, taking me with him, for major engagements in Australia, Japan, Canada and the United States. The assurance was that, unless Roger personally chose to do so, no further action would be taken about my position until discussions had occurred after we had both returned to New Zealand. But we were still on the other side of the world when a campaign began to break in the news media. The allegation was that I had "masterminded political plots” to “destabilise the Government.”

No-one in or connected with the Government has made any allegation at all to me. No-one has asked me to give an account of any action or alleged action. In these cases, nowadays, evidence is irrelevant,

As an old-time journalist, my last word should be about that. Beware of sources nowadays in the Beehive who do not want to be named, engage in character assassination, and present no checkable evidence.

I do not recall, in my time since 1957, a political machine in the past which worked quite like this one does. It has not, in the past year, been one that principled journalists could respect or admire.