by Tom Scott
The brutal pragmatists surrounding Roger Douglas, however, didn’t want to leave anything to chance and pushed for his deputy, David Lange, to take over. I witnessed an electric exchange in the House after one evening meal break that made this inevitable. Muldoon, a bit the worse for wear, as he often was after dinner, weaved to his seat and slumped onto the green leather sofa, abdomen bulging, watching the Deputy Leader of the Opposition stride confidently towards his seat like a Spanish galleon under full sail.
‘Hah! Lange!’ snorted Muldoon. ‘Your belly is bigger than mine!’
‘That may well be so,’ bellowed Lange, ‘but mine is higher off the ground!’
The Labour benches hooted and brayed with laughter and even government members grinned discreetly. It signalled a bellwether change. National’s chief government whip, Don McKinnon, told me later that when he looked back at his troops, most of their heads were down and their smiles wan. They knew what Muldoon knew also—his days of effortless dominance were over. The spell had been broken. Rhetorically at least, Muldoon had finally met his match.
Six months after the tour and the 1981 election I published a book called Snakes and Leaders. While in Christchurch on a book-promotion tour I was interviewed by The Press, which elected to splash the article across their front page in pride of place below the masthead. It wouldn’t happen today. Unless I was Justin Bieber.
Before the satirist, Tom Scott, left for Melbourne to cover the Commonwealth Heads of Government Conference, he drew a cartoon of what he thought would happen. It shows the Prime Minister, Mr Muldoon, walking up the path to the conference building and all the other world leaders diving for cover. ‘In the event, that was substantially what happened. They ignored him,’ said Mr Scott in Christchurch yesterday. ‘He was lonely and isolated.’
Although Mr Scott has had some very public problems trying to cover the Muldoon administration, banned from the Prime Minister’s press conferences, banned from the press party covering Muldoon’s visit to India and having difficulties covering the Melbourne [CHOGM] and general election, he does not seem to feel that Muldoon really has it in for him. ‘I have the belief, rightly or wrongly,’ he said, ‘that while I may irritate him from time to time, he’s not that opposed to me.’
He thinks his troubles stem from the fact that Muldoon does not like being laughed at and that he is sensitive to criticism and particularly to ridicule. ‘I don’t have strong feelings about him,’ Mr Scott said. ‘I have a personal regard for his political skills. He’s a very genuine New Zealander, a true nationalist, he really does care about New Zealand but at the same time I am disgusted in some of his behaviour and ashamed of some of his behaviour in Melbourne. I actually felt embarrassed to be a New Zealander. I’m sure if the roles had been reversed and I’d been going on like that, he would have been just as ashamed of me. I suspect he might be a bit ashamed of himself, but there was one thing you cannot do and this has scarred his Prime Ministership. He has an inability to apologise and admit his mistakes. It is significant that the thing missing from all his books is any acknowledgement that he has any human or political frailties. He’s got to see himself as a winner. He has got to rewrite history endlessly to prove that point.’
But where would Tom Scott be without Rob Muldoon? The satirist readily admits the Prime Minister is perfect material. ‘When there was a leadership challenge last year I don’t think anyone was more worried than the cartoonists and satirists of New Zealand.’
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MULDOON HAD ONE LAST MISSION to complete before his work here on Earth was done—the setting up of a new Bretton Woods agreement designed to solve many if not all of the world’s economic ills, and more particularly New Zealand’s, which were mounting daily. For those of you not familiar with the old Bretton Woods agreement, for nearly three weeks in July 1944 over 700 delegates from the 44 Allied nations gathered together in the colossal, brooding Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods in remote, upstate New Hampshire (imagine the sinister hotel in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining on steroids) to decide on a new set of rules for the post-World War Two international monetary system. To avoid the chaos and destructive anarchy of the pre-war years the agreement, which bears the name of the surrounding forests, set up the World Bank, led to the setting up of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and agreed to fixed exchange rates tied to gold. When the cost of the Vietnam War began bleeding America’s coffers dry, President Richard Nixon abandoned tying the US dollar to gold, effectively killing off the Bretton Woods agreement. Muldoon, who never met an economic regulation he didn’t like, wanted to bring it back from the dead, and with it the New Zealand economy.
In 1983, possessed of a cool intelligence, calm and independent (all sufficient grounds for Muldoon to veto him for the top job), the Deputy Governor of the Reserve Bank Dr Rod Deane (Sir Roderick since his investiture in 2012) suggested to me that there was sport and mischief to be had covering Muldoon’s visit to the IMF annual meeting—US President Ronald Reagan would be giving a keynote address and I would find Washington fascinating. The Dominion, New Zealand Herald, Radio New Zealand, the BCNZ and NZPA were sending reporters, so the Listener consented to me going as well. When I confessed to Rod that I knew absolutely nothing about economics he said not to worry, I would have something in common with most of the ministers of finance who would be attending. He recommended that I read Anthony Sampson’s book The Money Lenders—it would tell me more than I needed to know.
Unfortunately, I came down with a bad dose of flu two days before I was due to fly out. I took to my bed sweating, shivering and shaking. I should have pulled out but instead went to my doctor and got a horse syringe full of antibiotics injected straight into a buttock and flew non-stop from Wellington to Auckland, Auckland to Los Angeles, Los Angeles to Atlanta, Atlanta to Washington, apart from brief intervals sweating, shivering and shaking in transit lounges—where people gave me a wide berth.
That first night in the American capital Rod and his super-smart, kind and vivacious wife Gillian had arranged a ticket for me to accompany them to The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts on the banks of the Potomac River to a black-tie concert by the renowned violinist Itzhak Perlman. The music was stunningly beautiful but a deep fatigue overwhelmed me. I struggled desperately to stay awake until it became physically painful to do so. In the end I succumbed. It was a dreadful waste and a terrible shame. If I snored, Rod and Gillian were too decent to say anything.
Rod was right. Washington was fascinating. I was moved by Lincoln’s memorial, wowed by the Smithsonian and impressed by Capitol Hill. I went along to Reagan’s opening address to the IMF expecting to detest him, but the man Gore Vidal once famously described as having gone prematurely orange and being a triumph of the mortician’s art, knew how to please an audience. Someone had written a very good speech for him and the former actor delivered his lines word-perfect first take.
When the other reporters told me that Muldoon was holding a briefing in his hotel suite that afternoon I sounded out his press officer about attending. Beverly said she would get back to me. She did and I could.
The security at Muldoon’s hotel, the swanky Washington Sheraton, was astonishing. We had to go through X-ray machines and have our IDs checked and double-checked just to get into the lift taking us to his floor. My name had been added to the list so I was allowed up with the others. A big black Secret Service agent was waiting for us when the lift arrived. He had a clipboard and checked our names and IDs again. When we were good to go he led us down the long corridor to Muldoon’s suite, past another room that had been taken over by the Secret Service. Banks of screens showed black-and-white footage from cameras monitoring the inside of lifts, the stairs, the hotel foyer and other strategic vantage points. He knocked on Muldoon’s door. Beverly opened it. A few paces behind her, Muldoon took one look at me and growled, ‘Aaah, no, Mr Scott, you can’t come in.’ I stood awkwardly in the corridor as the other reporters entered sheepishly, closing the doo
r behind them.
The Secret Service agents with earpieces and dark shades were taken aback. ‘What the fuck, man? You’re on the list, what’s happening?’ I said I didn’t know. Clearly feeling sorry for me, they walked me back to the lift. Passing their room, I saw on a colour monitor that Australia II was leading in the last race off Rhode Island—the America’s Cup was about to head down under.
‘Do you mind if I watch this?’ I asked politely. ‘I’m from New Zealand. We’re neighbours.’ They readily consented and I was enjoying Australia’s victory when their boss, a big angry white guy, turned up.
‘What the fuck is he doing here?’ he snarled, pointing at me. Embarrassed, they tried explaining that I was a New Zealand journalist who at the last minute wasn’t allowed to attend his own Prime Minister’s press briefing. Not placated, he turned on me.
‘I don’t give a fuck. You can fuck off right now.’ I was frogmarched to the lift and bundled into an elevator going down. I punched the air when the doors closed. I knew I had a better story than anyone in the room with Muldoon.
The elation was short-lived. When I got back to my room in a seedy hotel on Washington Circle I got a phone call from Beverly; the Prime Minister was embarrassed about changing his mind and he would grant me a twenty-minute, one-on-one interview the next day at 11 a.m. Horrified, I grabbed Anthony Sampson and started devouring it madly—especially the section on Bretton Woods. I stayed up well into the night devising questions that would give me some semblance of economic credibility.
When I returned to his corridor the next day, the Secret Service guys were surprised to see me again. ‘Good luck, man!’ Muldoon let me in and sank onto a sofa. I sat bolt upright less than a metre away on an armchair. I had never been this close to him before for this length of time in broad daylight. He looked far older than his years. He had turned 62 two days earlier. His staff had got him an ‘Oscar the Grouch’ birthday card and a cake. The Secret Service demanded that one of his staff eat a slice first just in case it was poisoned.
When he spoke to me, his breath was sour. I was struck by the number of tiny warts he had running along his heavy, leathery upper eyelids. It was a curiously reptilian setting for astonishingly beautiful cornflower-blue eyes.
I began by asking him some patsy questions about Bretton Woods, much like a tennis warm-up, followed by some decent returns of serve that showed I could play a bit. He was agreeably surprised. My twenty minutes stretched into half an hour. It was quite extraordinary. It was almost pleasant. I left the room wondering if the Prime Minister was as surprised as I was.
I was not alone in detecting a new mellowness. His staff commented on his distracted, preoccupied air. On long flights, instead of burying himself in official papers or sleeping, as was his usual practice, he spent many hours just staring out at the clouds. He became philosophical. The visible decline in his powers was misleading. Any depletion needed to be measured against the original stockpile, which was formidable. And the authority he appropriated by sheer force of will was still staggering. There was only a minimal diminution in his ability to inspire psychic dread in those who dealt with him on a regular basis. Alastair Carthew, TVNZ’s senior gallery journalist, admitted to me once that he had no problem dealing with Muldoon if he primed himself beforehand, but meeting him without warning in a corridor could send his heart pounding.
From a distance I once watched him cross Bowen Street from Parliament to the Reserve Bank on foot. He virtually brought traffic to a halt and had pedestrians scattering out of his path. It was as if there had been a police warning issued about a pear-shaped man on the run with gelignite strapped to his chest who wasn’t to be approached under any circumstances.
After the IMF meeting his press conferences became curiously understated affairs. The scolding of the news media wasn’t entirely abandoned but his reprimands had a halfhearted air about them. If he didn’t come out in a fluffy sweater and sing ‘Moon River’ he got close.
I suspect that he knew the end was coming and he was getting his grieving, resignation and acceptance in early. Bill Rowling was facing the same fate. It took him a while but he eventually bowed to the inevitable, and at the end of 1982 announced his intention to stand aside to have a new leader elected by the Labour caucus in February 1983. I went to interview him and his bitterness took me by surprise. On three election nights I had been in the room with him and felt for him when he displayed commendable courage and dignity after stinging defeats.
‘Your cartoons have really hurt my feelings,’ he said quietly. He knew I liked him and he thought that guaranteed him some immunity. I think I know which cartoon hurt him most. I even winced when drawing it, but it was true and needed to be said.
Bill had three war medals pinned to his chest. One reads ‘Runner up ’78’, another reads ‘Also Ran ’75’, the third reads ‘No 2 in ’81’. Bill is saying, ‘I’m the only one battle-hardened enough to lead the Labour Party.’
MULDOON’S WELL-INTENTIONED BUT ULTIMATELY catastrophic King Canute response to the economic forces beyond his control has been well documented. For fresh accounts, I commend the brilliant Tony Simpson’s wise, elegant and feisty memoir Along for the Ride, written from a left-wing perspective, and Dr Michael Bassett’s somewhat drier New Zealand’s Prime Ministers, written with a neo-liberal slant. Both are excellent in quite different ways.
When I was studying physiology I learned that the heart muscle behaves as a functional syncytium. Every heartbeat, millions and millions of cells act as if they are one entity, contracting at precisely the same time, every time for a lifetime. If they don’t, you need a pacemaker. This makes the cardiac muscle unique. It marches to the beat of a different drum—its own. In the late 1980s, writing and researching a short film for Electricorp, Our Future Generation, I came to appreciate that it was a functional syncytium as well.
All its power stations, from Manapouri in the deep south, to the Clyde dam station, the upper and lower Waitaki stations, the Tongariro River stations, the Taupō geothermal stations, the Waikato River stations, and the fuel-burning Huntly thermal station, made up a concrete and steel syncytium as sweetly and beautifully synchronised as cardiac muscle. At Manapouri, thanks to routine maintenance work, the film crew and I were able to shoot footage inside the base of one of the penstocks. It was a slightly unnerving feeling walking inside a giant steel snail shell leading to massive turbine blades knowing that normally zillions of tons of icy water from the lake above us would be thundering through here. It was equally unnerving at Huntly, where again due to maintenance we were able to stand inside a giant fire-box where normally coal as fine as talcum powder was blasted into a furnace with a core temperature of 1200 degrees Celsius, turning water flowing up the myriad pipes lining the walls into super-heated steam—a giant Thermette, essentially. Even more wondrous was the control centre beside the Atiamuri Dam, just off Highway 1 north of Taupō. In a plain building behind high-security fencing is a room that looks like a kids’ version of mission control in Houston.
Every day, starting with low-cost hydro-electricity first and leaving expensive, polluting fossil fuels to last, Electricorp orchestrated power generation in precisely the right amounts at precisely the right time. You could tell when their timing was slightly off—your lights dimmed or flared. They called diminutive Lake Rotoaira just south of Lake Taupō the ‘breakfast lake’. It tops up overnight and that water is run through the Tokaanu power station turbines the next morning the instant Aucklanders step into their showers and put on their kettles.
Our film was exquisitely shot and directed by Waka Attewell, one of New Zealand’s finest cinematographers. Big, brilliant Shaun and Helen’s golden-haired, golden-natured Ned, both still teenagers, did some amazing animation for me on a primitive home computer. It was fronted by multi-award-winning nature-show presenter and producer—and my old chum from Massey—Peter Hayden, and edited by a very young John Gilbert, who recently won an Oscar for his work on Hacksaw Ridge. He made no ment
ion of Our Future Generation in his Oscar speech. I can’t speak for Peter or for Waka, but I personally found this omission hurtful.
Our little film won a prize or two in boutique film festivals, but ultimately it made no difference. Despite a number of overseas experts admiring Electricorp and advising that it be kept intact, it was carved up into separate competing entities, and subsequently these entities were sold off. This was the master plan all along. Consumers who used to own an electricity grid that supplied them with the second-cheapest electricity in the world (after Norway) are now held to ransom.
If you must sell people something, ideally it’s a product they simply cannot do without. That’s the aim. Electricity and toilet paper are good examples. The trouble with toilet paper, though, is that there are many brands and variables within brands to choose from. On a whim in a supermarket, consumers can switch allegiance to competing rolls—embossed, patterned, softer, tougher, double-ply or perfumed. For manufacturers it’s a pain in the arse compared to selling electricity, which comes one-size-fits-all. The size just varies slightly from country to country.
The great World War One humourist and pen-and-wash cartoonist Captain Bruce Bairnsfather’s most famous cartoon is of an older soldier crouching in a bomb crater with a young infantryman. Bullets whizz past uncomfortably close and shells explode over their heads. To the younger man, who is clearly unhappy with their location, the old guy is offering this advice. ‘Well, if you knows of a better ’ole, go to it.’ That’s the choice facing electricity consumers in New Zealand who want to change suppliers—a better ’ole. And good luck with the move. The mega-wealthy covet power utilities above all other investments for this very reason. As long as steam continues to billow out of the ground, wind continues to blow, rivers continue to flow and turbines continue to spin, all they have to do is count the money.