Book review: Derek Quigley is best remembered as the patrician farmer-lawyer who twice said “no” to dictatorial then-prime minister Robert Muldoon. While fellow National MPs Marilyn Waring and Mike Minogue triggered Muldoon’s decision to call the snap election in July 1984, which swept David Lange’s Labour Party into power, it was Quigley who had called out National’s disastrous policies.
He represented a classical liberalism that believed in limited government, property rights and private enterprise. His first political memory was meeting National leader Sidney Holland during the 1949 election campaign with other senior boarders at Christ’s College in Christchurch. National won a 12-seat majority as the country turned against 14 years of socialist restrictions and state intervention, which had accompanied social reforms and increased trade union power, led by Michael Joseph Savage and Peter Fraser.
Quigley’s 360-page memoir is that of a conviction politician rather than one of “I did it my way” justification. The former category has more value to future historians. Recent examples include those of Waring, Sir Michael Cullen, Margaret Wilson and Chris Finlayson. They better reveal success and failure in parliamentary politics.
After a brief backgrounder on the history of anti-socialist politics, Quigley sets out his personal agenda from that 1949 change of government: would National unravel 50 years of interventionism and eliminate import controls, tariffs and wartime price controls?
The answer was a resounding no. Nor did National abolish compulsory unionism after increasing its majority in the 1951 snap election on the waterfront dispute, remove the arbitration system that fixed wages, or reform the electoral system after abolishing the legislative council, Parliament’s upper chamber.
“Far from trimming government involvement in industry, successive National governments undertook, with taxpayer funding, major industrial projects such as the Tasman Pulp & Paper Mill and New Zealand Steel and, under the Muldoon governments from 1975, a range of Think Big projects,” Quigley writes.
He goes on to accuse National governments of adding to rigid social controls until the 1980s. “Pragmatism quickly became National’s secret weapon and eventually led to an ideological rift between private enterprise advocates such as myself and the party’s status quo politicians.”
Quigley entered Parliament in 1975 in Muldoon’s rout of a one-term Labour government. He was soon disabused of National’s ethical standards by his shock at the Moyle Affair and Muldoon’s use of police files.
“Many were prepared to roar like lions in private but became timid little lambs when confronted by Muldoon,” Quigley observes of his colleagues.
His opinion of them as untrustworthy and cowardly didn’t change right up to his forced resignation from the cabinet in June 1982 over a live TV interview on his opposition to economic policies that had pushed inflation into double figures.
Quigley first challenged Muldoon in 1979 by insisting on a caucus vote for the deputy leadership after the ouster of Brian Talboys and Muldoon’s choice of Duncan MacIntyre in what became known as the “colonel’s coup”.
Quigley’s liberalism was based on what worked rather than a belief in free-market ideology. For example, as housing minister from 1978, assistance was given to homebuyers for state and existing houses rather than limited to more expensive subdivisions in outer suburbs.
He re-entered politics as a co-founder of the Act Party in 1994 when MMP ended the two-party system. But he stayed only one term before moving to Australia to continue his career as a consultant, primarily in the defence area.
At 92, his memoir is too late to affect modern issues and is strangely less reformist than his earlier work with Sir Roger Douglas. But Quigley turned out to be on the right side of history, even if he couldn’t shape it the way he would have liked.
Challenging the Status Quo, by Derek Quigley (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $50), is out now.
