KEY POINTS:
Long ago when interisland ferries still ran overnight from Lyttelton, a school trip to Wellington was always a thrill. The day could include two visits to Parliament, one in the morning to sit in the empty chamber and hear how laws are made, the second later in the day to watch the House in session.
It was a morning visit that has stuck forever in my mind because while we were sitting in the padded leather seats a short, silver-haired man dressed to the hilt in a black jacket and brightly striped trousers appeared.
I must have been bored and fidgeting like a fourth former because I hadn't seen him come in. But all at once there he was, a face and a voice we knew on television, unmistakably the Prime Minister.
Mr Holyoake was on his way to some function. He made fun of his morning suit, calling the trousers "tiger pants". He didn't seem to be in any hurry. He was affable and natural despite that orotund plum, and talked to us a good while.
I still can't fathom why; we didn't come from a marginal seat or anything. It was a Catholic school in an electorate held by Labour. The long-standing MP, Mick Connelly, had a son in the class ahead of me.
Poor Connelly. I can't recall whether it was that day or during a visit to the school that we got to question both him and the nearest National MP, Eric Holland, and one of us asked the most common political question of the Holyoake era: "What's the difference between Labour and National anyway?"
Connelly said he thought there was a difference. Holland, sitting to one side, was smiling. Those were the years of "consensus", Labour's social security consensus, which National ruled.
Exactly why National came to be the preferred manager of the welfare state is a question commentators and academics have never really explained, or often acknowledged.
Holyoake, the main exponent of that consensus, who won more elections than any New Zealand Prime Minster since Seddon, has not had nearly the posthumous acclaim of his contemporaries. History has been kinder to Norman Kirk whom Holyoake twice defeated and John Marshall, supposedly the urbane liberal balance to Holyoake's provincial conservatism.
Holyoake has waited until this month for proper recognition. Reading Barry Gustafson's newly published biography Kiwi Keith is to discover that much was not as we remember it.
Behind the scenes Holyoake was not as conservative as he seemed on big issues of the time such as the Vietnam war and apartheid rugby tours. He was dubious of the US intervention in Vietnam from the beginning and kept the New Zealand military contribution minimal.
He, not Kirk, was the first Prime Minister to discourage a rugby tour, when South Africa would not accept Maori in an All Black team scheduled to visit the republic in 1967.
Five years later, when Holyoake had handed over the Marshall, it might be wondered whether the old consensus politician would have been quite such a stubborn "bridge builder" as Marshall when a racially selected Springbok team was to tour here.
A surprising discovery in Gustafson's account is Holyoake's indifference to British influences. Though he looked and sounded like a toff, his character appears to have been pure Kiwi farmer: practical, realistic, quietly independent.
Prime Ministers were also Foreign Ministers then and he seems not to have been a natural diplomat. Officials worried about his "elephantine humour".
As late as 1962 the British Foreign Office presumed the right to disapprove of New Zealand's chosen representative at the United Nations. Holyoake politely ignored this and other sniffs from London, culminating in his resistance to nuclear testing in the Pacific.
None of this was much noticed at the time, probably because Holyoake's style of leadership was to plod a step or two behind a loud crowd. If he looks strangely liberal in Gustafson's research now it is because when those records were written the public debate was well ahead of them.
The advent of private radio is an example. Radio Hauraki began illegally transmitting offshore from 1966. Public support for the "pirates" was immediate and immense. Thousands attended a meeting in the Auckland Town Hall to demand the NZBC give Hauraki a licence.
At the election that year Holyoake went only so far as to promise licensing power would be removed from the corporation and given to an independent body. The Broadcasting Authority was established, over Labour's opposition, in 1968 and Hauraki got a warrant in 1970. That was the pace he preferred.
I never got to report him, except once at a lunch where he was speaking as Governor-General, I went up to him beforehand to let him know I was there. He extended a hand and said: "Don't make an elephant of me."
I suppose that is what we did.
