KEY POINTS:
Chris Trotter remembers vividly where he was when he heard Labour Prime Minister Norman Kirk was dead.
It was 1974 and Trotter was in Motueka at a hippie commune. Kirk, his political hero, had been dead for 36 hours before Trotter found out.
"Someone just mentioned it casually, and I just felt all bereft," Trotter said.
While the 1970s may seem light-years away socially and economically from the New Zealand we know today, for Trotter, 51, it was a decade that was crucial in shaping the political landscape and future leaders for years to come.
"I really think it's important people understand that the 1970s - in spite of the best effort of the right to paint it as the decade that taste forgot and the only legacy was flares and disco - were actually a pivotal period.
"That '70s period, I don't think the left understood how close it came to bringing about dramatic changes in society. The right understood and their comeback was absolutely devastating. The history of the last 25 to 30 years has been the history of the right making sure that society doesn't get away on it again."
Trotter decided after reading Michael King's History of New Zealand that the historian had not quite captured the key moments, such as the reforms of the 1980s.
No Left Turn started out as a book about politics and history and grew into this "great big, fat history book".
"As Tolkien said 'the tale grew in the telling'."
Journals Trotter kept in the 1980s when he worked for unions, as well as a day book he kept "quite religiously" while he was on the New Zealand council of the Labour Party, proved an invaluable resource.
"Not only did it give details but gave the mood and atmosphere of the time."
He said his book reflected more closely the "lived experience of the '80s than would a right-wing account and certainly I think it reflects more accurately the lived experienced of the 80s than the version you would find in Michael King's book".
Trotter used his own library resources, which are home to a varied range of political views.
"There's the standard left-wing texts but also a lot of works by Michael Bassett, who is good for getting the other side of the story but he is also a damn good historian."
Is this book, then, a left-wing interpretation of New Zealand history or is it the only interpretation?
"I think the honest answer is someone from the left perspective as much as someone from the right perspective believes that their perspective is as near to the truth as you can get. Those who favoured the reforms of the 1980s would be bound to treat that period in a way which reflected well upon their actions and upon their motivations."
Trotter believed there was a lot of right-wing propaganda which people are not challenging, especially about the 1980s.
"I think the standard version, the TVNZ Revolution series showed - was this was a great coming of age, that it all had to happen, there was no other alternative, we grew up - I think that's the propaganda line which people tend to follow if they agree with the basic premise of monetarist revolution."
After three terms, Prime Minister Helen Clark has not sought to change any of those key economic reforms because of what happened in the Norman Kirk Government, he said.
"What happened to those left-wing leaders in the 1970s acted as a warning shot across the bows of all the social-democratic parties. And Clark, and her caution, her conservatism as a leader owes a great deal to what she perceives as the errors of her going too fast, taking on too many enemies, not giving ground when you've met a superior force.
"I think her whole conduct in government is a reflection of what she perceives are the lessons of the 1970s and also of the 1980s."
No Left Turn is needed for the "whole generation which has grown up in New Zealand with no knowledge of the New Zealand that was.
"For them this is normality, but of course it's not."
Trotter firmly believed there was a golden age in New Zealand and it can be found in the 1970s.
"When you look back at that period in the early '70s when we had absolute full employment, the dollar was worth US$1.20, exports were booming.
"To be young and alive in the early '70s was to be as close to an earthly paradise as you can get. If you wanted to define the good life as one in which the state and other institutions had as little power over you as is possible, where the individual is free to make their own decisions, live on their own terms - [that] was far more true of the early 70s than it is now."
Today, Helen Clark's government was as "left as you get in a world that has been so thoroughly reshaped by the right" while the National Party was rapidly moving towards the centre.
Trotter believed the political lessons Helen Clark has learnt over the past 30 years will "prevent her from taking the bold steps she needs to head off John Key".
Next year's election would be extraordinarily tense and bitter, he said.
Key's strategy would make the policy difference negligible so that the focus came on to a contrast between a young fresh male face and a "very familiar, getting older" female face.
National's success in the polls was misleading though, he said.
"The difficulty for National is that it has assembled almost all of the right wing votes from Labour. But if you look at the broader left bloc, you see the gap isn't as wide as just looking at National and Labour would suggest and this is once again a hangover, even among journalists, of first past the post."
For all the reforms and political battles, Trotter believed New Zealand was now "like the poor girl who comes to the skinny dipping party".
"We're the only one who's naked. Everyone else is on the side of the bank with their cameras going click, click, click. Because we've thrown it all off, completely bare."
- NZPA
