1984 Revolution: Denis Welch on David Lange - the leader that was led?
The 1984 election, 40 years ago this month, marked a momentous shift in direction for a country on the brink of bankruptcy. This article is the first in a multi-part Listener series looking at the political upheaval and the economic and social effects that continue to define New Zealand 40 years on. Here, Denis Welch considers the leadership of David Lange who, he says, despite his charisma was in many ways an unlikely prime minister who struggled to rein in Roger Douglas’s radical agenda.
I was at the Christchurch Town Hall on the evening of Tuesday, June 26, 1984, when the Labour Party launched its campaign for the election, due on July 14. With Labour having been in opposition for nearly nine years, if ever a campaign opening had certain victory stamped all over it, this was it.
There could be little doubt in the mind of anyone at the launch that the party would sweep into office three weeks later. The National government had run out of steam; it had all the electoral appeal of a boiled turnip. Its leader, Sir Robert Muldoon, who doubled as finance minister (an accretion of power unthinkable now), had increasingly been running the economy like his personal fiefdom, while souring the country with his abrasive, combative style.
In any case, he had virtually acknowledged his impending defeat by awarding himself a knighthood in the previous New Year’s Honours, knowing full well a subsequent government would never confer one on him.
Labour leader David Lange, by contrast, looked fresh, bright and unsoiled by mucky old politics. A generation younger than Muldoon, he was an ebullient man with an infectious, oratorical style, full of booming wit and good humour. Fired up by some stomping music, the crowd of more than 2000 gave him a tumultuous reception. He rewarded them (and the TV audience) with a speech full of motherhood-and-apple-pie promises intended, apparently, to heal the wounds inflicted by National and restore the country’s purpose, dignity and respect.
It was, as I wrote at the time, a high-powered combination of platitudes and utopian rhetoric. But it hardly mattered what he actually said; the thing was, he looked indisputably like a winner, and that was all his party needed.
He looked even more like a winner two weeks later when he demolished Muldoon in a TV debate. Muldoon, whose aggressive ways had made him seem larger than he was over the previous nine years, suddenly looked like he actually was: a small, ugly, rather toad-like man unable to convey a sense of vision or even generosity of spirit.
Toad vs teddy bear
Facing the 127kg Lange, he seemed to shrink even further into his seat. “Television was good to me,” Lange later acknowledged. “I was large. I was confident. I was reassuring. I was a teddy bear.” Teddy bear versus toad? No contest. Exit Muldoon, stage right, though he lingered on for seven years as an MP, moonlighting as a talk-show host and narrating a stage production of The Rocky Horror Show. He even did the Time Warp, which some would say was perfect casting.
As the Listener’s political columnist in the press gallery over the next few years, I got to see a lot of Lange close up. He was strikingly unlike any other prime minister this country has ever had.
For a start, he had an unnerving yet disarming way of talking himself down. Though he could rise magnificently to the occasion when major developments demanded it, he also made a habit of not taking himself entirely seriously. Socialising after his campaign launch speech in Christchurch, he was told by then-political correspondent for TVNZ Bill Ralston that, at 25 minutes, the speech had exceeded the normal attention span. “Yes,” grinned Lange, “I started to lose interest myself.”