Paul Moon: It's Michael Cullen - but without the glittering halo

Opinion

One would hope that Michael Cullen's former speech-writer, Jason Knauf, sticks with his work in PR, for which he seems to have some modest talent, and never crosses the divide into serious history.

His unblushingly hagiographical ode in the Herald to the former Labour finance minister craves a corrective - however brief.

Knauf's opinion piece was packed with effusive references to his past master's supposedly remarkable policy mind, a man whom he portrays as a "true giant" capable of "virtuoso performances in policy meetings" and someone who was no less than the greatest social democrat politician of his generation anywhere in the world.

In this inventory of adulation, Knauf speaks more of his capacity to be easily dazzled than of Cullen's contribution to the nation.

It is true that Helen Clark's finance minister presided over one of the longest periods of sustained economic growth in the country's recent history but he deserves credit for this to the same extent that medieval feudal lords deserved credit for good harvests.

It was largely a set of circumstances well beyond Cullen's control that was responsible for New Zealand's decade of prosperity.

However, what the finance minister did achieve was to increase the number of New Zealanders who became beneficiaries - possibly at the highest rate at any time since World War II. And instead of allowing the economy to flourish to its fullest extent, he choked it with unnecessarily high taxes.

He also maintained the state control of interest rates to keep a cap on inflation, choosing to ignore the fact that inflation tends to be a corollary to growth.

Much of the additional revenue that Cullen exacted from New Zealanders was swallowed up and lost in the largesse of an already bloated civil service and on supporting the new categories of beneficiaries he introduced.

We are now left only able to speculate as to how much stronger the economy would have been heading into the recession had it not been constricted by such policies.

Cullen's intellect has never been in question and he had an impressive and sometimes even entertaining array of put-downs. He and Clark were the powerful left and right jab (or should that be left and more left) of Labour's parliamentary party.

But like the dances of his distant Gaelic forebears, Cullen was capable of agile foot movements while remaining in one place.

That stationary position was due to his unyielding adherence to the ideology of the left - in particular, the sort of sentimental socialism which was joined at the hip with the type Michael Joseph Savage and Peter Fraser would have identified with.

Cullen strapped himself to this doctrinaire approach to state intervention even towards the end of his Government's life, when he was acting increasingly against the advice of a growing consensus of local and international economists. It is hard not to see the spectre of Muldoon's final years of obstinacy casting a shadow over the minister at this time.

Knauf and I would probably agree that Cullen's management of the country's economy was epic in New Zealand terms but where Knauf pictures this achievement almost like a Cecil B.

DeMille film, historians may well judge it had more in common with the great epics of decline detailed by John Milton or Edward Gibbon - a regime increasingly obsessed by its own hubris and limping to a fall.

Perhaps Cullen's final misjudgment was to keep himself on Labour's list and remain in Parliament after the latest election. Instead of a gracious exit from politics, he lingered a bit too long - "forgotten but not gone" as the Americans would say.

Knauf claims Cullen was "a man who worked tirelessly to better the fortune of New Zealanders". It can now be left to historians and economists to estimate how far short he fell from achieving that goal.

* Dr Paul Moon is professor of history at AUT University. paul.moon@aut.ac.nz