Editorial: Amnesia rampant at the top

The publication of David Lange's memoirs falls awkwardly into the current election campaign. For Labour, what might have been a slamdunk publicity advantage is tempered by the former Prime Minister's searing observation on Helen Clark's behaviour in the divided Cabinet of the 1980s.


Not only did she not stand up to fight Rogernomics, as in the retrospective legend, but she had something of an "I'm all right, Jack" mentality if her portfolios were not being overly targeted by the New Right.


The implication that she looked the other way is not a characteristic which would fit the campaign persona created for the Prime Minister. Particularly during a court case with the underlying symbolism of see no evil, hear no evil and do no evil in the rear seat of a dangerously speeding ministerial limousine.

For National, the book's recapping of the virtues of the anti-nuclear legislation and Mr Lange's high-minded stand against the United States makes that party's painful vacillations on the subject acute in the public mind. My Life can only rekindle the kind of dinghy-versus-submarine nostalgia that National wants to overcome. It may assist Labour to increase public suspicions of an unspoken commitment by National to overturn the law if it wins power.

For politicians in general, the Lange memoirs present a further, more abstract challenge. From the ravages of illness, Mr Lange is recalling, in some detail, events and exchanges of many years ago.


Yet the relentless trend in modern politics is towards an End of Memory. Ask the Agriculture Minister, Jim Sutton, a passenger in the perilous motorcade, if he noticed anything out of order and he remembers nothing of the sort, despite evidence of buses and cars swerving to avoid collisions and general public alarm in the countryside of Canterbury.


Ask National's Dr Lockwood Smith if he raised with United States senators, at a hotel, the potential for an American think-tank to help stir up the nuclear issue in this country and he, too, has difficulty, despite a contentious written record from a bureaucrat.


His leader, Dr Brash, may or may not have used the words "gone by lunchtime" at the same discussion in reference to the anti-nuclear law's fortunes if National was elected. A precise man in many ways, Dr Brash all too often frames answers to the "best of his knowledge" or "I cannot recall".


Helen Clark fell victim to the fog of time during the public dissection of her Paintergate efforts and of her intervention in the media coverage of the errant police commissioner Peter Doone. The inability to be precise about what one said and did is becoming endemic across parties and personalities.

Does this matter? It has been an accepted popular belief for years that you cannot get a straight answer from a politician. Politicians may simply be living down to their reputation. Yet now is precisely the time when voters ought to demand better: no one should settle for an election campaign in which the truth is tantalisingly out of reach on key issues. What goes on beyond the public record, in private at hotels or in Crown cars, and so on, can be of vital public interest.


A complication in the National-and-nukes incident is the reprehensible manner in which Labour has misused supposedly apolitical official notes for its own ends. However the manner in which politicians front up once such matters become public can be as important as any allegation made against them. Saying that they cannot remember is not good enough. In the short term it might save their own or someone else's skin, but the people see through disingenuousness. Down the track, there is also the prospect of sadly empty memoirs.