by Tom Scott
Jim Bolger looked at his watch. The big hand was on 12 and the little hand was on 10. Back on the farm they would have been knocking off for smoko. He remembered it well. Two cups of milky tea in a tin mug and four dozen hot-buttered scones. Mind you, people earned their tucker in those days. Many’s the time he and Joan would have got up before sunrise on their rugged King Country property and toiled without pause for eight or nine back-breaking hours folding nappies. Not to mention those long cold winter nights making school lunches. City folk would never have been able to hack it.
Sometimes, though, he wished that he were back on the farm. Everyone chipped in. No one complained. Unlike this lot, thought Bolger. Here they were on the second morning of a three-day policy formation seminar and half of them were wilting already. Most of them looked away when they caught his eye. Only Doug Graham gazed back at him quite unperturbed, sucking contentedly on his pipe, a cryptic smile on his face. Graham was altogether too composed and pleased with himself for a new boy. Bolger wondered what the cryptic smile meant until he realised that was the whole point—cryptic smiles weren’t meant to be understood. Two could play that game. He gave the Remuera MP a wink and took some satisfaction from the fact that the pipe fell from Graham’s lips and when he hastily put it back into his mouth he did so bowl end first.
‘Don’t all speak at once!’ said the leader of the National Party tartly. ‘Does anyone have any ideas that we can toss around a bit and maybe incorporate in our election manifesto?’ Down the back a small, compactly built, smartly dressed young man with blazing eyes and arteries that pulsed in his temples climbed on to the top of his chair and started waving his arms about frantically to attract attention. Bolger sighed. ‘Anyone apart from John Banks?’ Almost immediately a familiar walking stick was jabbed into the air and an excited cry of, ‘Too bloody right I do!’ emanated from the middle of the room. Bolger took a deep breath. ‘Anyone apart from John Banks and Norm Jones? A few policies would make all the difference to our manifesto.’
Warren Cooper turned wistfully to Venn Young, seated beside him. ‘A few years back we never used to worry much about policy, did we?’
‘We were the Government then, Warren,’ said Young gently.
‘It’s a nuisance, I know,’ continued Bolger. ‘But people seem to expect it. At this rate we’ll have to print a glossy cover and wrap it around some blank pages.’
‘It worked for Labour!’ shouted Paul East.
‘But only once!’ chimed in Winston Peters. The room chuckled but the laughter curdled when a tall, gaunt figure in the front row rose slowly to his feet. His thick head of hair was Brylcreemed neatly into place and behind wire-frame spectacles his eyes glowed with a strange cold fire. He spoke with the precision and gravity of a judge pronouncing the death sentence, pausing for up to a minute between each crisply enunciated word. It was Merv Wellington.
‘I crave your indulgence, Mr Chairman, if I may have the floor?’ As far as Bolger was concerned, Merv could have any part of the room he wanted. Especially the door if he shut it on his way out. He knew better though than to stop the Papakura MP and waved him on. ‘Prithee, good sir, a blank manifesto has been vouched and I say why not acknowledge openly and honestly on the cover that we have no policies!’
‘I think Merv’s point, whatever it was, was a good one!’ shrieked Banks. ‘We are going to need truth and light on our side if we are ever going to defeat these godless, atheistic socialists!’
‘The trouble is, John,’ said deputy leader George Gair, ‘we’re not dealing with godless, atheistic socialists. This lot are anti-socialist.’
‘Isn’t that just typical of your modern socialist,’ snarled Winston Peters, his voice thick with contempt. ‘They have no respect for their proud heritage.’
Cries of ‘Shame!’ and ‘Disgraceful!’ rang around the room until a cool, clear voice penetrated the babble. ‘Outrage has its place, but I think we must come to terms with a number of things if we are to make progress here …’ It was their former leader, Jim McLay. Bolger noticed yesterday just how relaxed the Member for Birkenhead had become now that he was no longer in the hot seat. The worst of his shaking had died down and he no longer scalded everyone in the immediate vicinity when he poured himself a cup of tea. ‘We have to accept that Labour have outflanked us on the right. They are more market-oriented than we ever dared to be. They are contemplating corporatising some government departments. They are privatising the BNZ. They believe in the user-pays principle. They have removed subsidies, floated the dollar, and are about to further deregulate the banking and finance sector. We must ask ourselves, where it will end?’
‘Gentlemen, fear not, be not of faint heart, I see it not as an end but a bold beginning!’ All eyes turned towards the small woman sitting to one side. It was Ruth Richardson. ‘If Labour have appropriated our territory and made it the middle ground, what is to stop us moving further to the right?’
‘How can we?’ asked a despairing Don McKinnon. ‘There’s no room.’
‘Nonsense!’ snapped Richardson, fixing him with a gaze that only needed to be a kilowatt or so stronger to be able to burn holes in a steel girder. ‘If we have the political will, and the courage to stick fast to our principles, the right kind of policies will fall into place.’
The short, pear-shaped man in the corner who had barely made a sound for two days put a little hand up. ‘Sir Robert.’ Bolger swallowed. ‘I wondered when we’d hear from you.’
‘It’s perfectly obvious, Mr Chairman,’ said Muldoon evenly, ‘that the National Party has been outmanoeuvred by the Labour Government on the right. There is nothing we can do about that now. But we could get our own back by outflanking them on the left.
‘What exactly do you have in mind, Sir Robert?’ asked Bolger cautiously.
‘Well, for starters we could socialise the means of production, distribution, and exchange.’
‘Brilliant, absolutely brilliant!’ shouted Banks. ‘I hope someone is taking notes!’
FOR THE RECORD, JAMES BRENDAN BOLGER, whose election slogan was ‘create a better society’, became Prime Minister with a huge parliamentary majority. Promising a kinder, gentler country, his government delivered precisely the opposite. As jokingly predicted in my column, Ruth Richardson’s neo-liberal zealotry became the new order. She cemented Roger Douglas’s reforms in place and went even further, until today New Zealand has the widest and fastest-growing gap between the rich and the poor of any country in the OECD.
It must be galling to Jim Bolger today that his tenure is remembered mostly for Ruth Richardson’s self-styled ‘Mother of all Budgets’—a shock-and-awe attack on the welfare state, named after Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s ‘Mother of all Battles’ boast before the first Gulf War in 1991, which was only marginally more destructive and cruel. At the time a television commercial for Drive concentrated laundry powder featured PAC-MAN-like cartoon red dots carnivorously devouring stains on clothing. A voiceover exclaimed that these wondrous dots were ‘hungry enzymes’. Lange quickly dubbed Ruth the hungry enzyme.
It was cruel and it was perfect. It fitted her shape and her Panzer-tank approach to politics. Ruth always spoke with authority. She didn’t appear to have a scintilla of doubt, which to people racked with indecision gave her huge appeal. When she was wrong she was inevitably wrong at the top of her voice, so if you weren’t paying attention you hardly noticed.
She had no dress sense when she first arrived at Parliament. She wore tweed skirts that looked like they had been woven from marmalade and sagging stockings the colour of cocoa. While serving as the country’s first female Opposition spokesperson on finance, then the country’s first female Minister of Finance, she began hitting the gym and underwent a complete style makeover, getting into power dressing in a big way. She wore jackets with shoulder-pads so wide that front on it made her look like an aircraft carrier. Meanly, I still drew her short and dumpy with her feet placed wide apart like the legs on a grand piano—the pelv
ic girdle of a ruminant, essentially. (Some of my Irish relatives have them. As a consequence, the second stage of labour is very short. Two coughs and you need someone with the reflexes of a slip fielder to catch the baby in one hand and the placenta in the other.) One of her press officers, understandably fed up with this mean and terribly unfair portrayal, rang me one day to say that Ruth had a fantastic body and was prepared to disrobe down to her underwear in her office to prove this to me. I declined. I couldn’t take the risk. What if I was smitten?
When Ruth stepped down from Parliament I drew her trim and slim in a tight-fitting Star Trek bodysuit, standing in a transporter pod, asking to be beamed up as her mission on earth was complete. Her office was on to me in a flash, requesting a copy of the original.
The most enigmatic thing, the most cryptic thing about Jim Bolger, the thing that baffles and perplexed most political commentators, the thing no one could fathom, not even his colleagues, was his complete and utter lack of mystery. Obviously very intelligent, he was nevertheless self-conscious about his lack of formal education—he left school at thirteen to work on the family dairy farm. As a result he had an understandable tendency to exaggerate his achievements. I asked him once how a one-on-one meeting with British Prime Minister John Major had gone. Jim puffed his chest, tilted his head back and intoned grandly, ‘Well, Tom, it was the usual world leader stuff …’
He hated being mocked in my cartoons. Dick Griffin hated it as well. He tried to slip quietly away from the ninth floor of the Beehive if my doodles were unflattering, but was often waylaid by an anguished howl.
‘GET IN HERE, GRIFFIN!’ Flushed with rage, jabbing his massive King Country paw at the offending page, Bolger would bellow, ‘YOUR MATE, GRIFFIN! YOUR MATE! DOESN’T HE REALISE THAT WHEN HE MAKES FUN OF ME HE IS MAKING FUN OF THE NATION?’
DICK IS ONE OF THOSE truly blessed people who can get blind drunk, sleep in his clothes in a rubbish skip and emerge in the morning and go straight to a GQ cover shoot without wardrobe or make-up having to lift a finger. I can purchase a new suit, shirt and tie, walk from the store and within sixteen steps look like a homeless person and have people give me money. It was a nightmare for him when he accompanied Bolger in the United States. Everyone assumed the pencil-slim, elegant man with the splendid mane of silver Bobby Kennedy hair was the New Zealand Prime Minister, and that the burly unmade bed beside him was his diplomatic protection squad bodyguard.
This confusion sometimes worked in Dick’s favour. In 1995, Sir Edmund Hillary was in Phaplu, high in Nepal’s Solukhumbu District, visiting one of his school projects, when he received a phone call from Buckingham Palace informing him that he had just been made a Knight of the Most Noble Order of the Garter. Membership of the Order is made at the sole discretion of the sovereign and is limited to 24 living companions at any one time.
It was a great honour, but it came at a price. Ed rang me in an agitated state on his return. He would have to purchase his own ermine robes and commission his own coat of arms, which didn’t come cheap, on top of travel and accommodation costs for himself and his wife, June. I said confidently that he should leave it with me, then promptly rang Dick in desperation to see if the Prime Minister could help. Dick rang me back a few days later. It was all sorted. The Reserve Bank, Brierley Investments and Air New Zealand were happy to pick up the tab.
At a function in Parliament’s banquet hall some weeks later I sought out the Prime Minister and thanked him warmly for helping Ed. When I saw complete incomprehension and an irritated curiosity sweep ominously across his features, I backed out of the conversation. Clearly Dick had never spoken to Bolger, but everyone he rang assumed that he had, and that he was ringing them expressly at the Prime Minister’s behest. When I challenged Richard on this he flashed his naughty altar-boy smile. ‘Did I give them that impression? How remiss of me. Oh dear, never mind.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
RAIDERS OF THE LOST DOG KENNEL
I WAS A PRIMARY-SCHOOL BOY sitting on a plank of wood on the muddy sideline and didn’t realise it at the time, but I first gazed upon Murray Ball one winter’s afternoon in 1959 at the Palmerston North showgrounds when the Junior All Black and son of an All Black marked the great, snorting, prancing British and Irish Lions winger Tony O’Reilly, who was half man, half racehorse.
‘Mostly O’Reilly beat me with sheer pace on the outside,’ sighed Murray years later, when I reminded him of the thumping Manawatū received. ‘Other times he sidestepped inside me. And then, when he got bored with that, he just ran over the top of me.’
Most rugby players get better and better in fond recall, but not Murray. Typically his nostalgia trod a fine line between lacerating honesty and mocking self-deprecation.
I remember still the exhilaration I felt when I stumbled across Murray’s early editorial cartoons in the now long-extinct Manawatu Times. They were nothing like the stolid, insipid, reactionary offerings in other newspapers. They burst off the page with a rude energy and undeniable humanity. Imagine a Giles cartoon if Giles had dropped acid. And they were drawn by somebody from my hometown! If you wanted to be a rock star back then it was a hopeless cause unless you came from Liverpool. Actually, if you wanted to be anything, coming from Feilding made everything a hopeless cause, until quite literally at the stroke of a pen, Murray opened up possibilities.
Those possibilities expanded exponentially when strips by Murray began surfacing in British publications. Stanley the Palaeolithic Hero, who graced the pages of Punch magazine for many years, was clearly the work of someone of astonishing wit and fierce intelligence. The black shearer’s-singlet-wearing Bruce the Barbarian, who appeared in a left-wing journal, was clearly the work of someone fiercely egalitarian. If it is possible to be too egalitarian, Murray most certainly was. Injustice and unfairness burned him, and as a consequence the fruits of his success always made him uncomfortable. When the imperfections of the real world bore down on him he departed England and retreated to a remote and beautiful part of New Zealand where he created a perfect world of his own, ‘Footrot Flats’.
Mike Robson, the editor of the Evening Post, saw the strip’s potential and snapped it up. Other newspapers followed suit. Seemingly overnight the strip was enjoying phenomenal popularity across New Zealand and Australia. A transplanted Northern Irishman, Pat Cox, a former newsreel cameraman and film editor, running his own production company making snazzy commercials in Wellington, fell hopelessly in love with the strip and the world it captured and approached Murray about making ‘Footrot Flats’ into a full-length animated feature film.
Murray had never written a film script before and recommended to Pat that I co-write the screenplay. I had only written one television play, Inside Every Thin Girl, but in Murray’s eyes that made me a veteran.
In truth it was a Victorian marriage. We were both innocents. We shared a rural Manawatū background. We both knew the sound sheep make when they cough at night, and the creak macrocarpas make in the wind. We’d heard weka call each other at dusk, roosters crow at the break of dawn and chained dogs howl at the moon. And we knew each other.
A friendship based on mutual respect and trust deepened over the next two years. Money was never mentioned. It was a passion project. We both had families to support and other paying jobs demanding our attention, but together and separately we devoted all of our spare time to the task. Sometimes Murray came to work with me in my attic office in Wadestown or I went to stay on Mikos, Murray and Pam’s slice of paradise just over the hill from Gisborne. One summer we met halfway and worked in a Palmerston North motel.
No matter the location, Murray insisted on breaking the day up with a sporting contest of some sort, usually involving eye–hand coordination, like golf, ping pong, squash or tennis—which put me at a huge disadvantage. To make the tennis interesting, we would play five sets, starting with me leading two sets to love and five games to love in the third set. Despite this seemingly unbeatable advantage Murray would chase me down and win t
hree sets to two, barely breaking a sweat. Long before Dean Barker was caught from behind and humiliated by Jimmy Spithill in the 2013 America’s Cup, Murray was doing it to me on a regular basis. His teasing was merciless. I don’t think I have ever laughed as much. He had a genius for including my children in games and making them great fun. Dear little Shaun burst into tears when a game of backyard cricket in Palmerston North had to be called off because it was pitch black and we could barely see each other, let alone the ball.
It took a year just to plot a rough storyline. Murray was astonishingly fecund. With every new plot suggestion he would sketch out on the spot more sight gags than we could possibly use. I soon realised that my major role would be to pare back the flood of material accumulating each scripting session and keep the storyline moving forward. I suggested ransacking his brilliant back catalogue for gags, but ever honourable and never one for short-cuts Murray insisted on all new material. He wanted the screenplay to remain absolutely faithful to the ‘Footrot Flats’ world, but he also accepted the need to introduce some external menace to sustain a feature-length plot. He came up with a new character, Vernon the Vermin, the King of the Rats, and during one weekend session he worked on the crocopigs overnight, arriving the next morning with the characters fully developed, fully rendered, lurking in the muddy waters of the script as if they had always been there. Remembering the terrifying wild boar in Battersby’s bush, I loved the idea. It was my suggestion to include the storm and flooding, and consistent with my fear of water I was the instigator of the Dog and Horse being washed out to sea at the film’s climax.