This routine,described by former prime minister John Key as “cathartic”, will become a thing of the past thanks to the library deciding to wrap the project up following the 2023 election.
Interviews for the project could last just a few minutes, or go for much, much longer. Prime ministers would unburden themselves of the day-to-day challenges of governing. But there was a catch. Unlike interviews with news media, destined for immediate consumption and the rapid metabolism of the 24-hour news cycle, Political Diaries interviews have never been released - at least not without significant restriction.
Not a second of the 1500 hours of interviews with 115 different participants, including prime ministers, party leaders, and significant MPs over 40 years has been made available to the wider public.
The high degree of secrecy is thanks to the strict conditions placed on releasing any of the interviews. These were necessary to allow subjects to speak with greater candour. In this, the project appears to have been successful. Former NZ First MP and minister Tracey Martin told the Herald last year her interviews were so candid they were potentially defamatory.
“Some of it is so honest that ... I have concerns,” Martin said, breaking off mid-sentence to explain she thought people would need to die to absolve her of the defamation risk hanging over the recordings.
“I can change the date that it’s going to be released because I think I do need for a couple of people to die before it gets released, just to save myself from defamation or something.”
The library’s acting chief librarian Jessica Moran told the Herald the National Library, of which the Alexander Turnbull Library is a part, “made the operational decision to close the long-running Political Diary Oral History Project”.
Former Prime Minister Sir John Key described the experience as “cathartic”. Photo / Greg Bowker
“Bringing the project to a close will allow us to focus our efforts on making the collection accessible to researchers in accordance with participants’ agreements, including completing description of the 5000-plus recordings and digitisation of recordings on audio cassette,” she said.
“The project, established in 1984, undertook diary-style, semi-regular interviews and sought to document a blending of the personal and political, from reflections on key decisions to how they ran their lives. Over the 40 years, there have been more than 115 participants and more than 4000 individual interviews.
“The project leaves behind an important record of four decades of politics and government in New Zealand. Public access to the collection is available but restricted under certain conditions of anonymity,” she said.
The library said the decision to wrap up the project was not made as a contribution to the 6.5 per cent baseline savings exercise undertaken by the current government, or the 2 per cent exercise of the previous government.
Key tried to squeeze in conversations around his busy political life, often calling the oral historian assigned to him from the back of Crown limousines, usually speaking for about half an hour.
“Some weeks you’re away or some weeks it just gets lost because there’s so much going on, you have a bit of a catch-up. So it’s not a perfect science,” he said.
Key enjoyed recording his side of issues, particularly when he found himself on the losing side of a particular news cycle.
“I remember at times beyond a variety of different issues just being pretty candid about what I really thought had happened,” Key said.
“So maybe there’s a back story there of ‘why’ and that’s the sort of thing they would ask and I might have a deeper knowledge of a particular ministerial issue and, you know, I may or may not have shared it - there are probably one or two things I didn’t share. because they were just very delicate.”
Thomas Coughlan is Deputy Political Editor and covers politics from Parliament. He has worked for the Herald since 2021 and has worked in the press gallery since 2018.
