THE PRESS FRIDAY, AUGUST 11, 1989. David Lange

Press, 11 August 1989, Page 18

THE PRESS FRIDAY, AUGUST 11, 1989. David Lange

The resignation of David Lange as Prime Minister was a remarkable event by a remarkable and unusual politician. He was rare among the powerful; he never hungered for power and was willing to let it go. His willingness not to exercise power against his enemies weakened his effectiveness as a politician but gave him, in return, strengths politicians often lack. His priorities in office and his method of leaving politics were not those of a professional politician. More than any New Zealand leader, Mr Lange cut the country’s ties of dependency with the major Powers. The defence ties with the United States are inoperative; the emotional ties with Britain have withered; the Rainbow Warrior affair and its aftermath ended any hint of subservience of a little country towards a big country. The closer relations with Australia he inherited have moved closer still. They have been accompanied by a degree of self-conscious raucousness from many New Zealanders, notably in the field of sport. His anti-nuclear stance reflected an idea whose political time had come: at the Oxford Union debate and at other forums he articulated that idea so eloquently and popularised it to such an extent that it is now part of mainstream New Zealand consciousness.

As Prime Minister, Mr Lange was an eloquent man, able to articulate a vision of society that both his Government and the public could aspire to. He could also manifest the downside of that eloquence by being glib, facile and simply gushing. These are two sides to the same coin and reflect the spontaneity and zest of his conversation. He was often an immaculate performer on television and this has been attributed to coaching; it was more innate than cultivated, and spontaneous outbursts led him into trouble many times. Mr Lange was always himself. He could fudge reality and he could be indirect, but he was not untruthful and if he found he had to change his mind then the biggest victim of his candour was often himself.

If his political strengths lay in his intelligence, his ability to synthesise difficult and complicated issues without being shallow, and his ready tongue and wit, then his political weaknesses sprang from being a loner. Mr Lange was never the leader of a faction. He was supported by factions, and in his last months tried to cobble together a faction to frustrate the new-Right economic agenda of Mr Roger Douglas. That was not where his skills lay. He never exhibited any talent as a political wheeler-dealer and at times showed a positive distaste for that aspect of political life. He did not need those skills when heading a united Government but their absence became glaring at the beginning of 1988 when he was under attack

in both his Cabinet and caucus. His natural response was to isolate himself further, to avoid contact with those members of Parliament of whose loyalty he felt doubtful. This applied even to those whose loyalty might have been won over. He battened down the hatches and tried to tough it out. In the 18 months since he overturned Mr Douglas’s flat tax proposal in January, 1988, when Mr Douglas was overseas, another facet of Mr Lange’s personality has emerged — his stubbornness. He was not good at choosing advisers and he was not good at managing them once there, but he knew his own mind and how to be patient. For so eloquent a man it was astonishing that he was prepared to get his way by being patient and stubborn. It became evident he had never been the butterfly his opponents had labelled him. When he came to understand the full implications of the economic path the Government was taking, his patience and stubbornness were the only way he knew to rescue his country and Government from the dramatic consequences of his own management failings.

After Labour assumed office in 1984 he allowed, almost encouraged, his Government to turn its back on Labour Party principles. This divergence imposed stresses on Labour unity it could not sustain. Eventually he came to make a choice between a Centre-Left Labour Party and a Labour Government implementing radical Right policies, and returned to his own philosophic roots on the Centre-Left. He sided with the Labour Party against the Labour Government and thereby helped keep the party and the Government together, although he could not prevent a Leftist group under Mr Jim Anderton breaking away. In conditions of deteriorating health, he fought a lonely battle to bring party and Government back together.

When he had a Budget that delivered social services as well as economic restructuring, when the business and financial community began to show the greater confidence farmers had already been showing, and when the public opinion polls showed Labour to have a chance of retaining office in the 1990 General Election, he went. Believing he had won all he was going to win, feeling the burden of fighting on his own, feeling that what he believed in might be safer in other hands then it was in his, he drew the conclusion that these all combined to give him permission.

Mr Lange presided over five years of dramatic and profound change in New Zealand. But perhaps his greatest wish was that even with all that change he could leave New Zealanders fundamentally the sort of people they were before, with the sort of society they could still feel comfortable in.