by Tom Scott
Thompson called his fax machine the ‘mojo wire’ and he dubbed his writing ‘gonzo journalism’. The novelist Tom Wolfe called it ‘the new journalism’ and The New York Review of Books, which didn’t approve, called it ‘zoot suited prose’—which is a compliment in my book. Thompson was to baby boomers what F. Scott Fitzgerald was to pre-World War Two America—with not dissimilar tragic endings.
I hate seeing people out of control, stripped of dignity and talking gibberish when intoxicated, so I am averse to drug-taking of any description—apart from caffeine, the odd hefty slug of Jameson’s and a glass or two of pinot. I have always maintained there is nothing wrong with double standards as long as they are high.
Christine had returned from a trip to China visiting collective farms, crèches and the like, convinced that Shaun should go into childcare. He was such an eccentric little boy, voluble and full of fun at home, but quite shy and timorous in the outside world. We tried placing him in a perfectly acceptable playcentre in Campbell Street, Karori.
‘You go,’ smiled an older woman running the show. ‘He’ll be fine.’ He was racked with sobs by the time I got to the door. I crouched outside a window for twenty minutes listening to him howl. When my bawling got louder than his I went back indoors and took him away.
A group of like-minded friends was setting up a family group to look after each other’s kids—Shaun had no problems with adults he knew and homes he was familiar with—so we joined. My turn in the child-minding barrel was Friday morning—as luck would have it, the same day as my Listener deadline. I was too busy chopping up apples, dispensing cartons of yoghurt and cleaning up after the odd toilet accident to be a wild and crazy guy. As far as I was concerned, gonzo wasn’t feasible in God’s Own.
The closest any of us ever got to fear and loathing was while covering Rob Muldoon at the height of his considerable powers. My first parliamentary exposure to him came when I was covering Roger Douglas’s Superannuation Bill Select Committee in the old Parliamentary annex behind Broadcasting House. (Douglas was an innovative, reforming, democratic socialist long before he became an innovative, reforming neo-liberal. Only his polite, unswerving, deadly zeal never changed.) Close up I witnessed a nifty piece of footwork by Muldoon that completely blindsided hapless government MPs on the committee. I mentioned him in dispatches:
Most of the Opposition members were on time but only two Government members had arrived. The deputy leader of the Opposition seized the moment. ‘Your lot are late,’ barked Muldoon. ‘Standing orders say we start at ten. Where is your chairman?’ His gravel-voiced delivery and his expression—a frown in the process of becoming a snarl—seemed to unnerve the forlorn Government members. ‘If you lot don’t nominate a chairman, then we will!’ And he did …
—
IT WASN’T MY FIRST CLOSE encounter with Muldoon. I wrote a piece on him for Chaff after he addressed a capacity crowd of students at Massey and ran rings around anyone foolish enough to challenge any of his assertions. As an exercise in intimidation it was only bettered by Māori activist Dun Mihaka in the same lecture theatre some months later. Wearing heavy boots, short footy shorts exposing thighs and calves the size of tree trunks, and a torn white singlet, he paced back and forth like a caged big cat, except we were the ones feeling trapped. He tore strips off smug Pākehā liberals who thought they should be congratulated for all they had done for the tangata whenua. Despite being outnumbered 300 to one he kept us all cowed and trembling for well over an hour.
Years later we became friends when he asked me to draw a picture of Prince Charles and Lady Di in the back of a speeding Daimler witnessing him baring his tattooed buttocks—which actually happened as they left Wellington airport in a crisp southerly. Dun was very lucky the wind-chill factor didn’t kill him. It was for the cover of his book Whakapohane, which someone should make into a film. When drawing the picture I discovered a tender side to Dun, which I hadn’t expected. ‘Make her, beautiful, eh!’ he purred. ‘She’s a very pretty lady!’
When Sir Robert Jones founded the New Zealand Party in 1984 with the express intention of prising the clenched, arthritic fingers of his old chum Rob Muldoon off the levers of the economy, the party held its inaugural conference in Wellington. Dun, who had joined the party that day, tried to speak to a remit on prison reform. He was denied permission and was asked curtly to leave the stage. He started arguing with the chair. Jones left the stage to call the police. The delegates stared screaming, ‘Out! Out! Out!’ It was a terrible moment for a party congratulating itself on its tolerance—and not the most pleasant moment for Dun either, who listened to the animals baying for some time before turning his back on the hall and dropping his shorts. Horrified members and security guards surrounded him like hyenas nipping at a wounded rhino. From the press benches I could see hurt and a rare fear in Dun’s eyes. I got up and led him away before anything crazy happened, whispering to Dun that it wouldn’t matter who threw the first punch—he would be the only one arrested. He was grateful.
Ironically, when Labour won in a landslide a few weeks later I met a delegation of Māori elders milling about one evening in Parliament’s foyer. ‘We’ve come down to talk sense into these new fellahs, eh,’ said a silver-haired kaumātua with a carved walking stick. ‘We’ve got to get Māori off the tit, Tom. We’ve got to get our young people off the tit of welfare.’ There were affirming nods and murmurs all round. Then his handsome face clouded over. ‘And you know what? We had to pay our own way here, eh! We had to pay for our own airfares!’
Dun’s finest gate-crashing was the time he eased past Parliamentary security and made his way to the august offices of the Speaker of the House, Dr Gerry Wall, who also happened to be his local MP. Wall was shocked to see him. Half rising in his chair, he pointed to the door and demanded Dun leave. Dun replied that given the fact he lived in Wall’s electorate, he had visiting rights. Differing views were exchanged on this matter. It got tense. Dun says he pushed Wall ever so lightly on the chest at this juncture and his ergonomic chair on rollers flew backwards, striking something and depositing the Speaker of the House of Representatives onto the carpet—across which he proceeded to crawl, reaching for the phone on his desk. Dun told me his mind started racing at a million miles an hour.
‘I said to myself, think, Dun, think! You are in a power of shit now, boy! Think!’ Wall’s bony, nicotine-stained fingers were about to dial. ‘Then it came to me!’ Dun slapped his huge hand on Wall’s, pinning it to the table. ‘You tried to touch my cock!’ Wall looked up at him, aghast.
‘That’s preposterous! I did no such thing …’ Dun told me he could see horror and uncertainty on Wall’s blood-drained face, which gave him some hope.
‘I’ve heard about you Pākehā perverts who love brown cock!’ Dun turned on his heels and exited. He expected running footsteps. Nothing. It was the same when he descended the front steps. No shouting, no ringing alarms. He reached his old van parked on the concourse and turned the keys, bracing himself for thumping on the door that never came. He drove off scarcely able to believe his luck.
I WAS PUSHING MY LUCK with Muldoon in the pages of the Listener. He was so confrontational and belligerent in the House that I had no choice but to write about him. Over the next ten years many people would ask me why the press didn’t simply ignore him. My stock response was that would be like driving across the Desert Road on a clear day and refusing to look at Mount Ruapehu—it couldn’t be done.
Shortly after Muldoon’s psychological victory in the Superannuation Bill Select Committee, he was at it again in the chamber. After a Beehive banquet and a bellicose address from a visiting US Secretary of State on the evils of communism where, to borrow Denis Welch’s great line, the Müller-Thurgau flowed like wine, Muldoon was more splenetic than usual during Question Time, accusing the elderly, amiable and somewhat bumbling Speaker Stanley Whitehead of shielding a minister. This is the parliamentary equivalent of a player shoving the referee—at minimum a sending-off off
ence. Hurt and rattled, Whitehead lamely requested that Muldoon withdraw and apologise. Instead he snarled that he’d had enough and was going to walk out, compounding the offence. His colleagues rushed to his defence, pleading clemency. Muldoon’s scowl softened and with a knowing smirk he rose and said, ‘I made it honestly. I withdraw and apologise.’ Throughout the afternoon. Opposition members came across to speak to Muldoon. Grins and quiet pats on the back were exchanged.
I wrote that the Terror from Tāmaki had done it again, and that it was a schoolboy apology from Parliament’s most famous schoolboy. Tiny hairline fractures began appearing in our relationship about this time. Two years later the wings fell off.
These days Winston Peters employs similar theatrics in the chamber but they lack his former role model’s deadly menace. It doesn’t help that at the height of his outrage Winston will sometimes wink at his bench-mates or flash a grin at journalists in the gallery.
When Winston was a relatively new, second-term Member of Parliament I was exposed to this bipolar skill shortly after I had mocked him in a cartoon. We bumped into each other in a back corridor and he immediately flew into a self-righteous, Old Testament fury—he knew exactly what game I was playing and he wasn’t having it. I reminded him of Mark Twain’s advice that you should never pick a fight with people who buy printer’s ink by the barrel. I was looking for a cartoon idea and he just might feature again. At approximately twice the speed of light his molten rage morphed into silken charm and an infectious crocodile grin bisected his handsome face. I have cartooned him mercilessly and viciously many times since, yet we remain on friendly terms. He sure knows how to hurt a guy.
Most political parties in Parliament host drinks evenings for the Press Gallery, and the Press Gallery reciprocates with a huge omnibus piss-up/barbecue at the end of the year where normally mild-mannered people get absolutely shit-faced. It is estimated that the majority of the members of the Speaker’s Chair Club gained entry to it in the murky aftermath of these Rabelaisian evenings.
The Speaker’s Chair Club is the ground-level equivalent of aviation’s famous Mile-High Club. To qualify you have to engage in an act of sexual congress in the Speaker’s chair, and it has to be with a land mammal of some description. For obvious reasons this is frowned upon when the House is actually sitting. The practice began during the tenure of Speaker Richard Harrison, the loveliest and most genteel of men, a Hawke’s Bay farmer who started the tradition of upholstering the Speaker’s chair in lamb’s fleece. It proved too tempting for the libidinous and Harrison could never figure out why the wool ended up with more lanolin than it ever had on the animal’s back.
Sadly, I never qualified for this most secret of societies, but in March 1974 I was invited to drinks hosted by Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition in their caucus rooms on the ground floor of the old Parliamentary Library. Journalists and their partners waited in a line to be formally welcomed by the elegantly attired Leader of the Opposition, the former Prime Minister and Attorney General Jack Marshall. The man who once threatened me with blasphemous libel, the man who I had recently drawn declaring he’d set up a shadow cabinet and he was head shadow, greeted me so courteously and so effusively it was almost embarrassing. Equally warm and gracious was his wife Margaret, still a great beauty in late middle age. Next in line was Marshall’s rumpled deputy, in an ill-fitting pale grey suit, white shirt stretched to breaking point on his billowing gut and a poorly knotted tie: Rob Muldoon. He took one look at me, shook his great dome of a head and refused to shake my extended hand.
I was shocked, but pretended to be quite unruffled—a lesson my father had taught me. Grabbing a fruit juice and a club sandwich I worked the room talking to surprisingly affable Opposition MPs until Marshall, with a little help from his friends, climbed unsteadily onto a red leather couch and in his soft, slow fashion and with a thin, damp-lipped smile, announced that next time we met for drinks National would be back in government. Gallery chairman Terry Carter sprang onto the same couch and said the press couldn’t possibly wait that long, and could they bring the drinks forward a few years. This elicited good-natured laughter, but Gentleman Jack was not wrong—except he would not be the leader. Within weeks of that drinks night his deputy had deposed him.
Two years later Marshall invited me to be a guest on the pilot of a television show he was hosting called something like After Dinner with Jack. Towering John Roberts, the left-wing, loquacious and opinionated professor of political studies at Victoria University, was one of the other guests. We pretended to eat a meal until Jack pushed back his plate, tapped a glass of wine and asked our opinions on the great issues of the day. I remember a fun-, banter- and laughter-filled hour ensuing. Afterwards a BCNZ producer armed with a clipboard came dashing into the studio to declare himself thrilled, but could we do it all again please, and could we let Jack say something this time?
Marshall’s demise came as no surprise to regular observers of the House. His aloof immobility contrasted starkly with Muldoon’s constant interjections, endless points of order and withering contributions to debates. Even more telling was the incessant exchange of notes, secret signals and knowing grins that Muldoon exchanged with his colleagues. There was a feeling that Marshall was prepared to let things happen, whereas Muldoon would make them happen.
The Third Labour Government had enjoyed an extraordinary honeymoon in their first year back in office. The Prime Minister, Norm Kirk, was much lauded, both here and abroad, for New Zealand’s fresh and independent voice in world affairs. In the House itself Kirk was an imperial, unassailable colossus. There was a feeling in National’s ranks that to give themselves any chance in the next election they needed to be led by a bare-knuckle street-fighter with scant regard for the Marquess of Queensberry rules. The Member for Tāmaki fitted the bill—even when perfectly still, slumped in his seat, he appeared to be grinding his teeth together. Blessed with a splendidly fierce countenance he would occasionally slowly scan the government benches and this would invariably leave the observed looking queasy and uncomfortable, as if caught in the glare of a searchlight sweeping from a watchtower. In a prison movie Muldoon would be the one leading the rioting and the throwing of food.
About this time, perhaps by sheer coincidence, his first and best book The Rise and Fall of a Young Turk came on sale. I went to the launch in a Wellington bookshop. Devoted fans lined up for autographed copies, asking for dedications to themselves or for relatives. I waited patiently in line then slid my copy onto the desk in front of him. Muldoon looked up without expression.
‘Could you inscribe it “to the fabulously talented, warm and witty Tom Scott”?’ I smiled. He said nothing and wrote: ‘I love your wit—such as it is.’
IN THE TWENTY YEARS THAT I covered politics for the Listener, the Auckland Star and the Evening Post (the latter two now deceased), I attended more party conferences than World Health Organization guidelines say is strictly good for you. Both major parties had their fair share of earnest lunacy. Put simply, Labour saw it as their sacred task to save the world, whereas National’s sacred task was keeping Labour out of office. It meant Labour’s annual get-togethers were like Lent and National’s like Mardi Gras.
At one National Party conference in Christchurch I sat in the back seat of a rental car in Hagley Park on a wet Saturday afternoon watching a girls’ hockey match, while in the front seat, the late Neil Roberts, a television reporter with more pirate charm than a flotilla of Johnny Depps, and Marilyn Waring, National’s rebellious outspoken lesbian, passed a joint back and forth, debating which girl they would most like to take to bed—though they didn’t express it quite that politely. I couldn’t help thinking I was not in Feilding any more.
At an after-match function at a National Party conference in Dunedin’s lovely old town, while music played and corks popped, I pointed to a not unattractive, blousy, Dolly Parton blonde across the crowded room and whispered to my colleagues that rumour had it she was Muldoon’s mistress. At National’s ne
xt conference one year later she pushed through the crowd, glowered fiercely and said she had a bone to pick with me.
‘You told your mates that I was Muldoon’s mistress!’
All wounded innocence, I insisted that I would never say such a dreadful thing and that she was completely mistaken.
‘Don’t bullshit me!’ she hissed. ‘I teach deaf children. I am a lip reader.’
What are the odds?
This sort of weirdness just never happened at Labour conferences, which was a great shame. Federation of Labour conferences were never that weird either, but they could get pretty whacky.
I was at their forty-third annual conference in Wellington’s old Town Hall when newly elected chairman Jim Knox, famous for his mangling of the English language, rose to his feet and announced proudly, ‘Fellow delegates! I have been coming to Federayshun of Labour conferences now for twenty-five years in concussion.’ It was hard to disagree with him.
That was the year his secretary mistakenly stapled two copies of the same address together and Jim didn’t twig to the suspicious thickness. Even at single thickness Jim’s speeches were not noted for their linear precision and clarity. Tossing caution and the rules of pronunciation to the wind, he would attempt ad libs. The effect was much like a stereo needle on a dirty LP—halfway through one train of thought the needle in Jim’s brain would skid and he would suddenly be ranting about something entirely different.
On this occasion his improvisations had pushed the speech out beyond the critical 60-minute mark. Bladders were filling, blood-sugar levels were falling, hairpieces were itching, nicotine cravings were kicking in and appointments for casual adultery in nearby hotels were fast approaching (in that regard, they had more in common with National than Labour). Delegates began shifting restlessly in their seats craving the magical words, ‘In conclusion …’