Gerald Hensley: Final approaches: A memoir

Gerald Hensley

An old Korean proverb states that however long power persists, influence holds sway for a lot longer. Politicians flex power - fleetingly. It is the public servants who advise them who have the influence. And through a long and distinguished career first as a diplomat, then head of the Prime Minister's Department and finally, before his retirement, as the Secretary of Defence, Hensley enjoyed far more than most.

Not that he is so crass as to trumpet the fact in a memoir made highly readable by virtue of being an insider's view packed with anecdote amusing and deadly serious. Hensley comes from the old school where departmental chief executives were rarely seen in public and never heard, and the boundaries between power and influence were clearly demarcated.

There is a glimpse of this in an exchange Hensley recounts between himself and then Prime Minister David Lange in May 1987. Lange and the rest of his Labour Government were still struggling to come to grips with the profound shock of the Fiji coup when they were presented with an added complication of an attempted hijack of an Air New Zealand 747 as the aircraft was transiting through Nadi.

Hensley, who had his hands full co-ordinating the crisis at the Wellington end, was suddenly told by Lange to fly to Fiji to co-ordinate negotiations with the hijacker even though, in Hensley's view, Air New Zealand and the local Fiji police were coping perfectly well.

Lange repeated his request. Hensley demurred. But when Lange asked a third time, Hensley acquiesced. Any further misgivings would have been insubordinate, he writes.

The incident sums up Hensley, the very model of the model public servant, the master of tact and discretion who knew when to persist with a point of view and when to pull back.

As the Prime Minister's most senior adviser, it was his job to come up with the practical solutions to the intractable problems that landed on his boss' desk. In Lange's case, Hensley almost managed the impossible in reconciling the unstoppable force, Labour's anti-nuclear policy, and the immoveable object, the US policy of neither confirming nor denying the presence of nuclear weapons on its warships.

His account of events in 1984-85 is an important contribution to the understanding of what was perhaps this country's most serious foreign policy crisis and certainly its longest (as is his recollection of the Rainbow Warrior bombing and its aftermath).

In the end, the proposal to allow a patently non-nuclear warship to make a New Zealand port visit was scuttled by Labour's left-wing MPs, whose suspicions of Hensley's leanings led ultimately to the Cabinet blocking his nomination as Secretary of Defence in 1990 during Sir Geoffrey Palmer's brief, faltering tenure as Prime Minister.

Of that episode, which thrust Hensley on to the front pages after he was placed on full salary on lengthy gardening leave, he says little, only that he set some sort of record "for being fired before I even got to the office."

The reader may also be disappointed he has nothing to say either about his subsequent lengthy stint as Secretary of Defence, having been reinstated in that post by National only for the new Government to slash spending on an already cash-strapped military.

In both cases, discretion again appears to have dictated events that are still too fresh and the protagonists still too active for him to comment.

That reservation aside, students of politics and history are indebted to Hensley for providing a fresh take on New Zealand diplomacy in the 1960s and 1970s and the two colossi of New Zealand politics in the 1980s - Lange and Sir Robert Muldoon.

The big surprise is Hensley's assessment of Muldoon. Hensley, who left Foreign Affairs to join the Prime Minister's Department in 1980, is rigorously fair in his analysis of Muldoon and even shows a degree of sympathy towards him.

* Published by Auckland University Press, $50