My long march from political certainties
Ifeared Rob Muldoon like some kids fear the dark. He bestrode my childhood imagination like a glowering colossus. He inhabited my nightmares for as long as I can remember (he became PM when I was 5), but it was the 1981 Springbok Tour that crystallised my worldview.
My family were fiercely anti-tour, even joining a kid-friendly protest on the day of the Athletic Park test. My dad, a brand new college principal in Porirua at the time, was vocal and passionate on the issue. In solidarity, my middle brother and I partook in a quickly outlawed version of bullrush at our convent school – ‘‘Police and Protesters’’ – while the older brother faced down pro-tour bullies in his third form class at St Pat’s, Silverstream.
It felt as if families and communities, even the nation itself, were falling apart – and along such a clearly delineated faultline that separated right from wrong, good from evil. To my mind, it was about apartheid, plain and simple. It struck at basic questions of humanity in ways that resonated so powerfully that I could only comprehend opposing views as the product of malevolence. From where I could see it, pro-tour sentiment was either the work of Muldoon or the devil – a distinction without much of a difference.
In this way, I had become a feral, one-eyed political partisan well before my teens. I joined the Labour Party as soon as I could, seeing David Lange’s eventual triumph over Muldoon in epochal, almost New Testament, terms. Lange, whose extravagant gestures and patterns of speech I half-jokingly began to emulate, could simply do no wrong. After all, we owed him our deliverance.
Of course, at 14 or 15, I had no idea about Lange’s governing agenda, much of it dubbed ‘‘Rogernomics’’ by then. But since it all seemed so fresh and radical, and more or less anathema to Muldoonism, I was full-throated in my cheerleading. Knowing now how little I understood then, I cringe at the misguided certainties.
As fatal cracks began to appear in his government, I remained devoted to Lange, reviling in equal measure critics from the disgruntled Left and Rogernome Right. To me, their various disloyalties imperilled Lange’s precious standing – and put the country at risk of falling into the wrong hands again. I made no effort to contend with the substance of their arguments; their treachery had disqualified them.
By now, I was a fully fledged, dues-paying, cardcarrying hack. In fact, by the time a cornered Lange finally resigned in 1989, I was being paid for the privilege as a Labour researcher. After the party’s defeat to Jim Bolger a year later, I even briefly advised Lange in his capacity as Opposition justice spokesman – a position for which, aged 20, I was laughably underqualified.
But I guess I had staked out territory as a loyal warrior for the tribe. This extended to factional allegiances, where my enduring fealty to the Lange era put me at odds both with the emerging Helen Clark forces and the Roger Douglas-backing, Backbone Club types who would eventually form ACT. By default, this defined me as a Mike Moore supporter, which would effectively render me persona non grata in the post-1996 Labour Party.
But I wasn’t done as a hack. Less than two years after my doomed efforts to help topple Clark for Moore, I’d crossed the Tasman to work for the Australian Labor Party’s deputy leader, Gareth Evans; then for a Labor premier in Victoria. I’d even transferred my factional loyalties, signing up to the Labor Unity or ‘‘Right’’ grouping, relishing every morsel of the intramural shenanigans.
From where I could see it, pro-tour sentiment was either the work of Muldoon or the devil – a distinction without much of a difference.
By now, I was nearing 30, way past the point any self-respecting adult should treat politics in that way. In any case, I had discarded political ambitions of my own – mostly because they got in the way of drinking. Battles once so fiercely urgent came to seem, well, faintly pathetic.
With that, my political journey, which had started promisingly enough on the right side of apartheid, had petered out into dilapidated hackdom. Luckily, once I came out the other side, most long-suspended critical faculties seemed intact.
To this day, I’m tribal enough that it would take five or more KiwiBuild-scale policy disasters – or, heaven forbid, Phil Twyford as leader – to dissuade me from voting Labour. By and large, it’s still the party most closely attuned to how I’ve come to see the world. But it’s often wrong, sometimes infuriatingly so, and too often unwilling to admit it. The same can be said of the Nats, of course – or of any political party anywhere.
It turns out that, despite my best efforts, the stark binary certainties of Muldoon v Lange, or other fairy-tales of good and evil, however exhilarating, cannot withstand prolonged exposure to the world as it actually is.