Former Prime Minister John Key’s relationship with the All Blacks began out of a sense of duty and partly as an image rebranding exercise but morphed into something more genuine and binding.
Key, having banked millions overseas as a currency trader, needed to present himself as a man of the people when he returned to New Zealand in the early 2000s to begin a career in politics.
He had a legit back story, brought up by a single mother in the no-frills Christchurch suburb of Bryndwr, but voters don’t have the time nor patience to care about back stories.
Politics swings on the here and now, the last headline written, and when former Labour Deputy Prime Minister Michael Cullen famously called Key a “rich prick” in Parliament in 2007, that was his Lady MacBeth blood spot that he would always be trying to erase once he became Prime Minister the following year.
Americans may see the accumulation of individual wealth as inspirational and go all-in on a billionaire president, but New Zealand was never going to universally warm to someone who had become rich doing something most of the country could barely comprehend was even a real job.
The length of Key’s political tenure would be determined not so much by his ability to sell policy to the nation, but whether he could sell himself, convince the country he was in the trenches with them, and so he came into power with a determination to cultivate an image as an everyday guy.
There was a classic shot of him swigging a bottle of Steinlager, tongs in his other hand, while he and Prince William barbecued together at Government House, and there was his shock the jock moment when he revealed on Radio Hauraki that he had peed in the shower and nicked stuff as a kid (it was an apple off a neighbour’s tree).
But Key’s enduring popularity – along with his ability to endear himself to a wider segment of the population than a right-leaning millionaire should have been able to manage in the midst of a Global Financial Crisis his former City mates had caused – was achieved off the back of the relationship he built with the All Blacks.
“Like a huge number of young New Zealanders, growing up I was always in awe of the All Blacks,” recalls Key.
“I thought they were incredible, and I thought they personified what we thought was the best of New Zealand – that they won on the world stage and that they punched above their weight.
“New Zealanders were filled with pride and, irrespective of their political views or other views, they were a unifying factor.
“With that as a starting point, the second thing that happens when you become Prime Minister is that you have, to a certain degree, the ability – but it is more of an obligation – to go and see sporting teams in action.
“I did a lot of that. I went to see the Fifa World Cup and to the netball and equally also with the All Blacks and the two World Cup wins they had when I was Prime Minister in 2011 and 2015. You meet the team and from there a more public relationship started.
“I don’t know if you would sit there and say it was a cold, calculated decision I made that if I had my picture taken sitting next to Richie McCaw it would be good for me and I would get lots of votes.
“It wasn’t as cynical as that. I just loved the team, and it was cool I had the opportunity to be around them.”
The adage about sport and politics not mixing well was never true with Key when he was Prime Minister between 2008 and 2016 as he found a natural home in the All Blacks changing room.
It was where he could be the man of the people he so needed to be – a quick chat with McCaw, a beer with Dan Carter, a few jokes being shared with coach Steve Hansen and pictures would go around the world of superstar All Blacks at ease with their Prime Minister, their body language saying they didn’t mind the bloke at all, and that maybe they didn’t even see him as a politician, but a decent guy who got what they were all about.
Key was by no means the first Prime Minister to build an association with an iconic sporting team to boost their popularity, but he was arguably the best at it.
There was an alignment between his vision for New Zealand being the plucky overachiever from the end of the earth and the All Blacks’ history of being just that.
And there was perhaps a shared similarity in that Key’s first two years in power were essentially about keeping the country economically afloat through the GFC, while the All Blacks had to survive their own turbulence that came in the wake of their failed 2007 World Cup campaign.
But even then, it always felt to those looking in that there was something deeper connecting that All Blacks team to the Prime Minister, and if the relationship began out of a sense of duty and partly as an image rebranding exercise, it morphed into something more genuine and binding.
As much as Key enjoyed being part of the post-match bonhomie every now and again, so too did the players and management enjoy having him there, and their association appeared to be mutually beneficial.
The All Blacks’ two most commanding figures, Hansen and McCaw, were both National supporters and such was their influence on the team at that time, that their ease and comfort with Key permeated through the squad.
Key believes, however, that while his relationship with the All Blacks helped his personal brand, the most tangible political leverage he gained through rugby was in 2008 when two iconic figures in the Pasifika community, former All Blacks Michael Jones and Inga Tuigamala, came out in support of him.
Key’s popularity soared through 2010 and 2011 – a period which saw the All Blacks lose just three tests and collect their first World Cup title in 24 years.
The feelgood that swept the nation in October 2011 was reflected in the way the general election played out a few weeks later when Key and his National Party gained 47 per cent of the party vote and 59 seats.
And even the unforgettably awkward three-way handshake between McCaw, Key and World Rugby boss Bernard Lapasset at the World Cup final seemed to only enforce the Prime Minister’s status as part of the wider All Blacks’ family.
“Having got closer to the All Blacks, there were quite a few members of that team who were very strong National supporters,” says Key. “Just like I was interested in rugby and how they were playing, they were interested in politics and how the National party was going and how the country was going, so it was a mutually beneficial relationship.
“The All Blacks used to think I was a good luck charm because I never saw them lose live when I was at a game as Prime Minister and it really did get to the point where Steve Tew [former NZR chief executive] would ring me up and say you had better be at the game.
“But if you get to the final punchline I suppose, was it helpful that there would be pictures of me in the changing rooms or that I was associated with them? The answer is yes.
“I think if you didn’t like me or what I stood for as Prime Minister then that was never going to change your vote. I think people make their own decisions when it comes to voting.
“Would we have lost the 2011 election if France had got a penalty in the last minute? I don’t think so but there is no doubt that the country loves it when our sports people do well across all the codes.
“I would have thought there is a link between sport, the national psyche, the feelgood factor and ultimately some of that can rub off on the incumbent.”
The period 2012 to 2016 was probably the best four years the All Blacks have produced in their history.
They became the first team to successfully retain the Webb Ellis trophy, they set a world record of 18 consecutive victories, and they lost just three tests.
They were, as Hansen wanted them to be, the most dominant team in the history of rugby.
Key’s tenure is harder to judge or definitively assess given the natural divide of politics, but he will be remembered as one of the most popular prime ministers in New Zealand history. All the various polls and research indices show his approval rating may have declined towards the end of his time in office, but that it remained relatively high.
Mostly the country saw Key as charismatic rather than arrogant, and whatever he did or didn’t achieve politically, he did at least pass himself off as the man of the people he wanted to be seen as. The closeness of his relationship with the All Blacks – but McCaw in particular – was undoubtedly a factor behind his perennially high preferred Prime Minister status.
But one issue, backed my McCaw, polarised the country and dented Key’s popularity.
The project was Key’s referendum to change the flag in early 2016.
McCaw decided to support it, not just because he believed in Key and considered him to be a friend by then, but because when he ran out to play in the 2015 World Cup final against Australia, it annoyed him that it was so hard to tell the flags apart.
“Richie came out and supported the change-the-flag campaign,” says Key. “Funnily enough I didn’t ask Richie, he just raised it with me and that he was going to support me because he thought there should be a change.
“If you go back to our campaigns, we ran three election campaigns, really, on the slogan building a brighter future. It was all about making New Zealand more successful and within any government and any prime minister there is a series of individual policies but, and I think it is probably true of a company or a sporting team as well, that they wrap into a broader and more coherent vision.
“My vision was always that New Zealand is this little country at the bottom of the world, no one owes us a living, so we had to get out there and win on the world stage.
“And that we needed to back ourselves and have a strong national identity and that was what the flag change was about. I cared far less about what was on the flag and should have gone for the black with the silver fern just as the Canadians went for the maple leaf.
“That’s what I should have done and just said we are doing it, but I didn’t and that was all about that sense of national identity and winning, which the All Blacks were doing in that particular era.”
Having seen his flag referendum fail and having never wanted to be a career politician, Key unexpectedly resigned in December 2016.
As it would turn out, 2016 would bring the curtain down on the All Blacks’ golden era as well.
That was their last great year: the last time they were truly dominant on the world stage.
That Key became so close to the national rugby team was maybe a surprise given the sense of disappointment the All Blacks’ coaches felt with the National Party after they won the 2008 election.
Earlier that year, the All Blacks were facing an unexpected exodus of talent with another three (seven had already left straight after the tournament) of their 2007 World Cup squad – Jerry Collins, Chris Masoe and Nick Evans – indicating they would be heading offshore after Super Rugby.
When Carter said he too was going to sign with Perpignan for two years, the coaching panel of Graham Henry, Wayne Smith and Steve Hansen began looking for political help – ways in which the Government could intervene or support the All Blacks either financially or with legislative or political innovation.
Smith recalls reaching out to the Government for help.
“Steve, Graham and I approached the Labour Government and put an idea to them similar to the Irish model where if you play out your whole career in Ireland you get all your tax back.
“If you play a lesser amount of your career, you get less of your tax back. If you leave to go overseas you don’t get the same tax break. We thought something like that would be positive.
“Rugby, though, was seen to be self-sufficient and was historically seen to be that way, so there was no appetite for them to help us out,” said Smith. “The following week we met with the National leaders, and they had a huge appetite for it, but when they got into power it didn’t happen.”
The primary reason it didn’t happen was that it didn’t fit with the cleaned-up tax regime Key was building and nor did he feel it was feasible for a government to support just one sporting code in such a specific way.
“Pre-election they may well have had discussion with Bill [English] or with someone, who knows, who was likely to become a minister,” said Key.
“My point being it was never raised with me prior to the election. After the election what was absolutely raised was general tax and ways to try to lessen the tax burden to keep New Zealand players in New Zealand and secondly government support for the game and some of the top players.
“The challenge we had was that we had dropped the personal rate to 33 per cent and we had a pretty clean tax system and the whole point of it was to say that we are aligning the top rate with the trust rate and company rate and we had no exceptions on GST – all of those kind of things. And so we just didn’t have a system that ever had that kind of carve-out.
“The other problem would have been that why would you just do it for rugby players and not other codes and other disciplines. It wouldn’t make sense.”
The All Blacks coaching panel got nothing tangible from Key or his National Party in the same way they couldn’t mount a compelling argument to convince former Prime Minister Helen Clark and her Labour Government to help.
But what they did get from Key was a sense that he was more empathetic to the wider issue of retaining talent and that he understood the brand value the All Blacks generated for the country.
“I had some sympathy for that because if you look at rugby as a general rule, for the calibre of player and their dominance of their discipline, rugby players are underpaid,” says Key.
“If you look at how much a top basketballer like Steve Adams gets or a golfer, it is huge.
“Richie and Dan were the Ronaldo of rugby but they sure as hell weren’t paid like Ronaldo.
“But the problem was that rugby, relative to other codes in New Zealand, is quite rich. I know that Steve Tew and Mark Robinson [NZR chief executive] would utterly disagree with me, but on a relative basis they do have quite a lot of cash.
“But the demands are high and the competition they face for their players where the market is internationally mobile is challenging for them more than other disciplines.
“Where that argument was most pronounced was the America’s Cup. They were getting $35 million and I used to get all sorts of codes coming to me saying we are important, and we do lots of things and bring lots of people to New Zealand so why do these guys get everything and we get nothing?
“And you can see the argument to be blunt and equally the America’s Cup cost a lot and we had a lot of history in sailing, the Labour Government had funded them and we weren’t going to renege on their obligation, so we carried on paying it.”
The business of sport clearly interests Key and having been heavily involved in the financial markets and then serving eight years as Primer Minister, he has a skill-set and experience that make him wellplaced for a governance role.
He says he was approached to consider applying to be the independent chair of the nine-person board governing New Zealand Rugby’s CommercialCo.
“There was a bit of discussion about me doing the role that Ian Narev is now doing,” he says. “I had an early approach from those guys. In the end I didn’t put my name forward. It was lack of time – I had too much on.
“Whether I would have got the job or not I don’t know but I think I would have enjoyed it.”
He says he was in favour of NZR completing a deal with the US fund manager Silver Lake, because in his view, doing nothing was not an option.
The business needed not only money, but the right kind of investment partner – which he says, could never have been the Government, despite that being one of the options.
“The simple answer is I was in favour of private equity getting involved,” says Key.
“I was in the camp that said, ‘look, rugby just needs an injection of capital somehow, and yes there is a risk that capital gets spent and they become more and more diluted and all the rest of it, but there is no simple way out of this’.
“I would have said no to the government. The problem is that government brings bureaucracy and not dynamic thinking, as a general rule, when it comes to the commercial space.
“The bureaucracy way is to always say no because no one gets fired for saying no, they get fired for saying yes and I just don’t think they would be a great partner.”
The nation goes to the polls the day before the All Blacks play their World Cup quarter-final.
And in a way, the lack of confidence the country has in the All Blacks reflects the political uncertainty.
Neither team nor country feel like they are punching above their weight.
Both have lost their way a little post-Covid and because neither Chris Hipkins nor Chris Luxon have built any kind of association with the All Blacks – although the latter did sit next to Robinson at the second Bledisloe Cup test in Dunedin this year – Key doesn’t believe the events of this World Cup will have any major bearing on the general election.
“My sense is it won’t have a dramatic influence mainly because it is not being held in New Zealand,” he says.
“At the 2011 World Cup [with] New Zealand towns across the country adopting teams it just captivated the nation, all the way through to Dan pulling his groin muscle, Beaver [Stephen Donald] kicking the goal.
“The whole thing was full of drama and ticker-tape parades – you name it and we had it, and to me that is a different deal to the event being held in France.
“To be fair, the All Blacks were in a poor period of form – for them – in 2022 and the nation’s expectations have probably lowered a little bit about how they will perform at the World Cup.
“I would be surprised if the correlation is particularly high this year and neither Chris Luxon nor Chris Hipkins have been particularly associated with rugby I don’t think.”
But should New Zealand make the World Cup final two weeks after the election, the Prime Minister, whoever it is, will most likely be on a plane to France, hoping that in time, they can emulate Key and link their own brand story to that of the All Blacks.
As Key proved, the All Blacks are a ticket to enduring popularity for anyone smart enough to know how to bring the two worlds of sport and politics together.
Gregor Paul is one of New Zealand’s most respected rugby writers and columnists. He has won multiple awards for journalism and has written several books about sport.
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