David Lange was Prime Minister for five years, before being replaced by Sir Geoffrey Palmer. This photo from the Herald archives shows reporters swarming him after that decision.
On July 26, 1984, David Lange was sworn in as the 32nd Prime Minister of New Zealand.
The arrival of the Fourth Labour Government marked the end of nine years of National rule under Sir Robert Muldoon, which came to an end after the infamous “Schnapps election’.
While Lange was popular with the public, a legacy that endures to this day, his premiership ended abruptly after only five years, when a falling out with his Cabinet saw him resign and replaced with Sir Geoffrey Palmer.
To mark 40 years since this event, The Front Page is revisiting the end of the Muldoon years and the ascension of Lange, and what his enduring legacy is.
Newstalk ZB senior political correspondent Barry Soper covered the 1984 election, including getting an early concession from Muldoon before polls had opened, that the then-Prime Minister walked back the next day.
He told The Front Page that the electorate was tired of Muldoon by that point.
“I don’t think the country appreciated economically just how bad it was. We lived in an icebox. Everything was frozen. Wages were frozen. Prices were frozen. Interest rates were frozen. And something had to happen. Something had to go.”
Soper’s earliest memory of Lange is from when he first became an MP, and came in where a “big brown suit”, and knew from the first conversation that he was “extraordinarily clever”.
However, Soper doesn’t think that the Labour Government appreciated how serious the country’s finances were, which were exacerbated by Muldoon refusing to devalue the dollar in the days between him leaving office and Lange being sworn in.
“Eventually, the dollar was devalued, but of course that opened up all sorts of problems. For example, mortgage interest rates had gone from the cap put on them by Muldoon of 9% for the first mortgage and 11% for the second, [to] as high as 22%. So people really that might’ve been struggling in 1984, they were in dire straits, after the Roger Douglas-David Lange Government came into power.”
One thing that Lange will be remembered for is his position on nuclear energy, with his Government making the country nuclear-free, which has continued to this day. Memorably, in 1985, Lange debated the issue at Oxford University, uttering the line “if you hold your breath just for a moment... I can smell the uranium on it as you lean towards me”.
Victoria University of Wellington political professor, Lara Greaves, said that that moment is still taught to politics students today.
She said that Lange is an interesting figure, with a presidential-type quality that turned him into that beloved figure he remains to this day.
“When it comes to politics, it’s not just the razzle dazzle, the baby kissing, there’s also a component of being in government, being in governance, being the Prime Minister, as in the primary minister who has to run Cabinet and who has to keep a Cabinet and a party together,” Greaves said.
“And I think there are real criticisms of his leadership. From the left, we see criticisms that he did let [Finance Minister] Roger Douglas kind of go down his own ideological pathway, and perhaps Lange didn’t have those people management skills and that those strong management skills in the Cabinet. And from the right, he’s potentially criticised as not having that substantive policy direction himself.”
Soper said that Lange was popular with people, and that he and Douglas did face a difficult situation, but his legacy as a political leader is difficult to judge.
“As a Prime Minister and as a leader of his own people in Cabinet, I don’t think he was certainly anywhere near the best that I’ve seen in my time there.”
Earlier this week, the Herald resurfaced an interview Audrey Young conducted with Lange in 2004. Asked about his reputation of being attacked by the right and left, Lange replied:
“This is the difficulty about talking about it without sounding big-headed but you cannot speak of New Zealand now without my involvement in what it has become. My judgment of that is that it is a change for the better and my instinct tells me that if it hadn’t been for our administration there would have been calamity after calamity.”
Responding to that quote, Soper said: “Certainly you can’t talk about New Zealand without thinking about David Lange. And that comes down, and it’s still enduring, of course, is the anti-nuclear stance.
“But the other thing I think is probably more important was the foundations that Roger Douglas laid for the economy in New Zealand. Now, those foundation stones have never been shifted by successive governments, and that’s 40 years on. And I think that’s the most important lasting legacy.”
Greaves said that statement is typical of politicians reassessing their legacy.
“If we were to reassess that and kind of look at the way that different Prime Ministers and Finance Ministers since then have positioned themselves, they’ve kind of copied his lead. So thinking about Ruth Richardson and Jim Bolger and all of them who came after him, they’ve kind of said the same sort of thing about their legacies and that they also said that they were facing a financial crisis, and Lange definitely faced a financial and constitutional crisis.
“I think it’s just kind of a way that politicians position their legacy because we never can really know what would have happened if Muldoon hadn’t called the snap election and had managed to somehow stay in power.”
Listen to the full episode to hear more from Barry Soper on what the years under Lange were like, and from Greaves on what Lange’s legacy is today.
The Front Page is a daily news podcast from the New Zealand Herald, available to listen to every weekday from 5am. The podcast is presented by Chelsea Daniels, an Auckland-based journalist with a background in world news and crime/justice reporting who joined NZME in 2016.
You can follow the podcast at iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Expectations tempered around return to surplus in 2027/28.