David Lange on election night, 1984. Vintage nzherald.co.nz photo
The big line from the commentators five days into the new US Administration is all about the joy of boring, predictable politics. You’ll sleep easier.
No 3am Tweet storms. No tantrums with colleagues, or love-ins with foreign dictators. No family members choppered in from real estate or event planning to oversee, say, Middle East peace or immigration issues with Mexico.
The Biden Administration, instead, is showing us it will be staffed by technocrats who know what they’re doing. So White House press briefings will be dry and workmanlike rather than high drama and alternative facts. They’re information sessions for pros, not competition for Netflix. Remember, this far into the Trump administration, the “American carnage” of the inauguration speech had been pushed way down the bulletins by Sean Spicer’s claims about the biggest inauguration crowd in history. Etc, etc, for four years.
Mario Cuomo famously said politicians campaign in poetry and govern in prose. Biden never went for the poetry part, despite the rave reviews his inaugural poet Amanda Gorman got for her vision of a more pure democracy last week. Thanks to COVID and the ongoing train wreck that Trump was providing, Biden campaigned more in a basement than in poetry. Saying as little as possible so as not to undo the reasonable expectation that decency and orthodox political positions would have to be better in the long run than ongoing government-by-trauma.
Of course, the Trump way might have left everyone on edge and ready for a quiet night at home, but it also guaranteed Trump dominated the news for four years solid. We’ve all become accustomed to rowdy social media feeds and furiously opinionated players screaming at us.
When the relief of the change of approach wears off, old fashioned politics as usual will have a big job to do keeping our attention when it matters.
Of course, in New Zealand, we know a thing or two about boring and predictable politics. We’ve been making a virtue of it for about 30 years.
We had our excitement in the 1980s and – spoiler alert – it didn’t turn out well for any of the politicians concerned. It started with Muldoon who, whatever his policies were, certainly was a break with the years of torpor that previous National Party leaders gave us. But by 1984 it was all crashing in around him and the David Lange’s government won its mid-winter, snap-election landside and set about changing forever the way New Zealand is governed.
I was a green young press gallery reporter at the time, and it was a dream job. Looking back on it, I think my role – and I took to it without complaint – was to explain and applaud as wave upon wave of reform were hurled down at us.
It all seemed to go famously well for three years, so much so that Lange’s government got an even bigger majority in 1987. But the man himself was having doubts. What would it profit a man if he gained Remuera and lost his own soul? Well, something like that. He seemed to believe he’d lost the soul of the movement he led. So he started to tear it down.
Chaos, sackings and the eternal demonization of Roger Douglas ensued. That too, was fun for a reporter. I thought it was intriguing and special to get unprompted Sunday afternoon calls from Lange’s speechwriter, confidante and future wife Margaret Pope offering the inside running on the coming week’s dramas. Looking back, it seems more tragic. They were fighting like hyenas over the carcass of their government up there in the Beehive, and nothing about it was very becoming.
I was trying to see a reasonable way through it all. I thought David Caygill held great hope as the new Finance Minister. I later thought the Peter Dunne way was very admirable.
Needless, to say, Labour lost the 1990 election, big time. But in its first term, the Jim Bolger-led National government believed its true inheritance, the role New Zealanders wanted of it, was to pick up the excitement where it had left off.
So Bolger’s Finance Minister, Ruth Richardson, set to work on her first Budget which she christened the “mother of all Budgets.” She picked up the phrase from Saddam Hussein’s mother of all battles over Kuwait, which doesn’t leave much doubt about the vibe she was going for. The words weren’t printed on the deep matt blue of the document cover, but they stuck.
Richardson didn’t. After surviving a narrow scrape in the 1993 election, Bolger sacked her as Finance Minister, signalling a return to moderate ways and a determination to cling ever more to the centre line. And that was it, really, for New Zealand governments trying to push the boat out, as we used to say then.
Since then, we’ve shunned poetry and drama and been uncomfortable with anything too much like a vision. The Helen Clark years made a strength of efficiency and discipline to make incremental change, most of it seemingly dreamed up by Deputy Prime Minister Michael Cullen on his summer breaks. The Key/English years brought affability and astute reading of the public mood into play. Both avoided scaring their followers with anything too exciting.
For a brief time in the 80s and early 90s, our politicians boasted about breaking the pattern, making unpopular but right decisions, defying vested interests. They became articles of faith. Since then, “nothing to see here” is what it’s about. Predictable, boring, cautious, in line with market expectations.
Put like that, we should bring a lot to the Biden relationship – the politics of turning down the heat.
Hey John - I’m doing some research into the 1984 election - what was the deadline for submission for evening papers like the Auckland Star? What time did you need to finish your Lange stories for publication, for example? :)