John Roughan: You just had to be there

Leave the country for a few months and you are bound to miss something important. When I left in mid-April Helen Clark's Government was cruising to re-election. The economy was humming, the Lions were coming, the country was as content as it had been for longer than I can remember.

Michael Cullen was happily packing away surplus tax revenue for contingencies, such as my generation's superannuation, and nobody outside the National Party and Act seemed to mind.

I have returned to a different place. Everyone now wants a tax cut. The National Party has found some traction in time for the election, and Cullen is surrendering the surplus.

The trouble with being out of the country is that political things will happen that can only be understood intimately.

I've asked everyone why the mood changed. I have been told about the May Budget and sudden expectation of tax cuts which Cullen failed to dispel. I've heard about the Budget's packet of chewing gum and other incidents such as the Education Minister's tennis balls. But I have no sense of the public impact of these events and never will.

Long ago during an absence of several years I missed the 1978 election, which Sir Robert Muldoon nearly lost, and the subsequent rumblings in the National Party that culminated in the attempted "colonels" coup against him.

By the time I returned, Muldoon was as dominant in national life as he had been when I left. Ever since, I've doubted whether my idea of him accords with the public memory.

This time, too, the impact of events had largely dissipated on my return. I returned just as the Prime Minister named the election date and almost immediately the polls reverted to put the party portions back where they have been for most of the previous six years. I am having great difficulty believing National has become a serious contender this year. But I can't argue; I wasn't here.

Thankfully, I was here in the years that David Lange was Prime Minister, and privileged to have been in the parliamentary press gallery for the beginning of that extraordinary time. You occasionally encounter people who were out of New Zealand during those years and they leave me wondering how they can understand what happened to the country then or since.

This election, like every other since 1984, will be fought in the shadow of the economic change that started that year. It was more than an economic revolution, it was a national catharsis, and David Lange made it so. His sheer personality was a liberation from Muldoon. Lange lent the Douglas programme his optimism, confidence, compassion and joy for life.

Those who missed those years have not been helped by most of the accounts since, including those about Lange's illness and his death.

They will not be much helped either by his memoir. It could have been so much more considered and reliable if he had got down to the task when his health still permitted him. Composed by tape-recorder, it gives a sketchy version of events.

The book is valuable, though, for the insight it gives to Lange's psychology. Among his contradictory characteristics was a tendency to be warm and distant at the same time. The warmth was genuine but always wary. And he could be cruel - as he is in the book - to close colleagues. 

When they read his references to his mother's mode of parenting they will probably understand.

Lange's exceptional quality was personal autonomy, which might be the positive side of his mother's influence. He seemed bigger than any role he took on, including even the Prime Ministership. He could put his own inclinations above others' expectations. He believed he could break the rules of a role and get away with it, and usually he did.

He and Sir Roger Douglas defied the safe conventions of politics during their three years of galloping economic reform. When he decided Douglas was going too far, Lange cast aside the conventions of cabinet responsibility in his attempt to stop him. That was his downfall.

The fact that he was the instrument of his own demise has been largely lost in the various recent accounts of his career.

His resignation was widely portrayed even at the time as a noble and tragic gesture. In fact, as he says in the book, the caucus left him no option when it restored Douglas to the Cabinet.

The saddest element of the retrospectives in recent days has been the mythologising of Lange's role in the nuclear stand-off. Uncharacteristically for someone usually brutally honest with himself, Lange himself reinforced the myth at every opportunity.

Let's be clear about this, as he would say. He wanted both the nuclear policy and the Anzus alliance; many in the Labour Party did not. When it was pointed out to party conferences that a nuclear ban would threaten our acceptance in the alliance, there was an extra gleam in many an eye.

Six months after Labour came to office, Cabinet was considering its first request from the US Navy for a ship visit. Lange was on a visit to the Tokelau Islands. Acting Prime Minister Geoffrey Palmer, in his innocent, methodical way, explained to a press conference how the ship visit might be permitted even though the US adhered to its policy of neither confirming nor denying whether it was carrying nuclear weapons.

New Zealand would make that decision for itself, Palmer explained. The Government, on the advice of its officials, would assess whether the ship was likely to be nuclear armed. When word leaked that the vessel was one of the oldest, conventionally powered destroyers in the US fleet, the visit looked to be on.

At least that's the way it looked to the likes of backbenchers Helen Clark, Jim Anderton and party president Margaret Wilson.

In the book Lange denies that the decision to refuse the visit was made under backbench pressure. "The last people I listened to at that time were the likes of Anderton and Clark." But something happened to sabotage a possible Anzus-saving solution before Lange's Cabinet.

Then he championed the policy with aplomb and few remember how the role was thrust upon him. Probably, you had to be there.