A recent ranking of New Zealand’s 23 prime ministers showed no change in orthodox views. This is not surprising given the three judges were leading political historians who helped create that orthodoxy.
Correspondents to the New Zealand Listener, where the rankings were published, predictably noted they were all white males, two of whom were retired. The editor’s response noted that only one history department in the universities wanted to be involved.
Maybe the exercise was beneath them, believing “beauty parades” were insensitive and offensive. The story did not, in fact, rank the PMs from top to bottom. That was done by a non-academic historian, Philip Temple, who ranked them from 1 to 23, based on the judges’ individual choices.
For the record, they were Michael Bassett, Erik Olssen and Jim McAloon, all of whom have written extensively about the Labour Party and its leaders. Temple’s rankings were led by Peter Fraser, Helen Clark and Richard Seddon, followed by William Massey and Michael Savage. The National Party’s contribution was headed by Keith Holyoake at sixth, Jim Bolger seventh and Sid Holland at eighth.
It’s notable that three of the top four led the country through the 20th century’s two world wars. The four National leaders who were in power during the rare periods of prosperity – Holland, Holyoake, John Key and Bill English – were rated as middling (Key and English were 14th equal Temple’s rankings).
Great subjectivity
Derek Quigley lives in retirement in Spain.
Economic management was one of the three criteria but appears to have given way to the others, leadership and legacy, which have a greater degree of subjectivity. This suggests National governments have generally been under-served in New Zealand’s historiography. A new if overdue contribution is therefore welcome.
Derek Quigley’s Challenging the Status Quo is a 360-page political memoir that covers his two periods in Parliament: 1975-1984 as an electorate MP for National, and 1993-96 as an Act list MP. But mostly it’s an insider’s account of conservative politics from the birth of the National Party in 1936 to the modern day.
Quigley provides five reasons for conservatism’s early lack of popularity: the impact of the Depression; the replacement of laissez-faire by interventionism; the decline of free market economics in favour of Keynesianism; the popularity of welfare policies; and controls associated with World War II.
Public opinion started to swing National’s way in the 1943 and 1946 elections. Success came in 1949 with a solid 12-seat majority due to National’s hardened opposition to socialism and increased trade union power.
Quigley was a boarder at Christ’s College in Christchurch when Holland visited during the 1949 campaign. But Quigley’s convictions were soon disappointed as Holland resiled on his pledge of “no more socialism in New Zealand”.
He writes: “Did this mean National was about to unravel 50 years of interventionism and get rid of import controls, tariffs and wartime price controls, people asked? The eventual answer was a resounding no.”
High taxes
Official portrait of Sidney Holland in 1953.
Food subsidies were lifted but soon re-imposed. Taxes stayed high and compulsory unionism remained despite the government’s massive win in the 1951 snap election after the prolonged waterfront dispute.
Far from trimming government involvement in industry, successive National governments undertook, with taxpayer funding, major industrial projects from the Tasman Pulp and Paper mill and New Zealand Steel through to the Think Big ventures in the 1970s.
Quigley also notes National’s support for puritanical social controls that persisted until the 1980s. “Indeed, successive National governments added to them. Pragmatism quickly became National’s secret weapon and eventually led to an ideological rift between private enterprise advocates such as myself and the party’s status quo politicians.”
After two unsuccessful attempts in Christchurch’s safe Labour seat of Sydenham in 1960 and 1963, Quigley’s political ambitions were finally realised in 1975 as Robert Muldoon routed a one-term Labour government weakened by the death of Norman Kirk and a global recession.
Robert Muldoon celebrates on election night, November 29, 1975.
By then Quigley had a background in the army, running the family farm in North Canterbury, and a career in legal practice. He turned the Rangiora electorate into a safe National seat.
But as a backbencher, he was soon disabused of Parliament’s ethical standards by the shock at his leader’s use of police files in the 1976 Moyle affair. Quigley also realised Muldoon was not prepared to grasp economic reforms as the antidote to stagflation.
Import controls
“Instead of contemplating reducing tariffs and import controls to free up the economy, or relax price controls, Muldoon thought that intensifying their application would bring inflation under control.”
Of course, it didn’t, but Quigley had few supporters in the cabinet, to which he had been promoted in 1978 as minister of housing and associate minister of finance.
The need to reduce government spending was a key aim of Quigley and his reformist supporters along with officials in the Treasury and Reserve Bank. Muldoon feared any changes “would inherit all the pain and little of the benefit by the next election”. This enabled him to hold power over the caucus.
Queen Elizabeth II with the cabinet in 1981. Derek Quigley is at the far left, front row.
Quigley first challenged Muldoon in 1979 by insisting on a caucus vote for the deputy leadership after the ouster of Brian Talboys and Muldoon’s choice of Duncan MacIntyre in what became known as the “colonel’s coup”.
When the issue came to a vote in early 1981, Quigley learned that political commitments were worthless, as his erstwhile backers such as Bolger and Rob Talbot switched camps. The final vote was never disclosed. Quigley believes he was tied with MacIntyre and that Muldoon cast the final vote. This contradicts Muldoon’s assertions in his fourth autobiography, Number 38 (1986).
Lions and lambs
“Many were prepared to roar like lions in private but became timid little lambs when confronted by Muldoon,” Quigley observed of his colleagues. His opinion of them as untrustworthy and cowardly didn’t change right up to until his forced resignation from the cabinet in June 1982 over a live TV interview on his opposition to economic policies that had pushed inflation to 20%.
Derek Quigley in campaign mode.
Long before the public had heard of Rogernomics, Quigley had drawn up an alternative 11-point economic plan for the 1978-81 term. He is proud of this legacy and future historians will find much of value in his account of his expulsion from the cabinet and achievements while in it.
Quigley did not stand in the 1984 election, which brought an end to Muldoonism and an era for National that had seen it in power since 1949 apart from two one-term Labour governments. During that period, New Zealand declined from among the world’s richest countries per capita. This was due to low productivity and a tax regime that increased government revenue in real terms by 190% (106% population adjusted) while the gross wage of the average one-income family rose only 20%.
The country's plight was mainly self-inflicted and this was Quigley’s judgment of National in 1984: “It was arrogant, tired, out of touch, riven by internal conflict and reluctant to move against the myriad special-interest groups it had created.”
Derek Quigley stood for the new Act Party in 1996.
Having prematurely left politics at 52, and rejecting Bob Jones’s New Zealand Party, for his comeback Quigley chose Act, which he co-founded with Roger Douglas in 1995. Quigley spent just one more term in Parliament as a list MP before retiring to a life of consultancy in Australia, mainly in the defence area.
Again, he rejected the growth of pragmatism in Act that put headline-grabbing populism ahead of conviction-based neoliberalism. In his conclusions, Quigley surprisingly offers little reformist zeal: cures for family violence, a reduction in poverty, a bigger defence force, longer parliamentary term and better public advice are unlikely to upset the status quo.
Some minor errors need correcting: former NBR publisher Barry Colman’s surname is misspelt (p319); property investor Bob Jones does not like being called a “developer” (p176); and the wine is called cabernet sauvignon, not cabinet (p193).
Challenging the Status Quo: A political memoir, by Derek Quigley (Te Herenga Waka Press).
Nevil Gibson is a former editor-at-large for NBR. He has contributed film and book reviews to various publications.
This is supplied content and not commissioned or paid for by NBR.
