Fridays with Jim

Conversations about our country with Jim Bolger

David Cohen

• Publisher: Massey University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780995137868
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Biographies politiques

A self-taught son of Irish immigrants, devout Catholic, King Country farmer, and farming lobbyist, Jim Bolger entered New Zealand political life in the 1970s. He was a flinty Minister of Labour under Robert Muldoon and Prime Minister from 1990 to 1997. As ambassador to Washington, he helped create warmer relations with the United States. In recent years, he has chaired boards, has been the chancellor of the University of Waikato, and marked more than a half-century of marriage to Joan. Never given to orthodoxies, yet staunchly National in his politics, in his still-energetic eighties he remains an impressively brisk progressive thinker. For six months he regularly sat down on Fridays with the writer David Cohen to reflect on his life and times, our nation and the world. Fridays with Jim reveals a quintessential man of the old New Zealand who is fully in sync with the new New Zealand, and with plenty of ideas about where it's all heading.

Ninth Floor

An odd claim but, to the best of my knowledge, true: I think I may be the only journalist in New Zealand history to have accidentally named a Budget. This is how it happened. On the morning of 20 February 1991 — the time and date are easy to recall because it was only a few hours after my first son was born — I arrived at the Beehive to interview Jim’s then right-hand woman, finance minister Ruth Richardson, for the Evening Post. I was told she would be a bit late. I ended up sitting out in the reception area for a while, leafing through the pile of Economist magazines that Ruth always made a point of having on the table. Naturally, as the world was still in the midst of the first Gulf war, some of the articles were about Iraq’s then defiant leader, Saddam Hussein, and his vow to prosecute the ‘mother of all battles’ against the US-led coalition looking to displace his army from Kuwait.

I was still reading about it when Ruth finally appeared. She scolded me, in a friendly sort of way, for coming along for an interview so soon after having a child. ‘How’s the mother?’ she asked, and I said she was doing fine, thanks, and then I quipped, ‘And how’s the Mother of all Budgets looking?’ She said she liked the line, which also found its way into my subsequent article — and became the informal name of that year’s Budget.

The austerity plan, as it essentially turned out to be, would also prove to be the mother of all headaches for Jim during his first term as prime minister. Certainly, it was one of the things that most threatened to overshadow what was otherwise an impressively West Wing-style professional administration in which Jim figured as a kind of chairman of the board.

So what did that kind of corporate arrangement practically mean? Leadership, Jim still likes to say, essentially comes down to making difficult choices, which I suppose is essentially what the philosopher Karl Popper was getting at when he said that all life is problem solving. Given his labour minister background, which by definition was about finding workable resolutions that various parties would not agree to on their own, Jim’s style of business probably wasn’t so surprising. Still, it’s not something he has talked about a great deal over the years. It seemed like a good theme for our next Friday conversation, which began with a bit of scene-setting about the old media days and extended to reveries about the Richardson relationship — and more about the other woman, Jenny Shipley, who would replace him as party leader.

The media part of being prime minister never used to worry me. It was slightly different in a few respects, though. What we didn’t have in the 1990s was these quasi-interviews on the run into Parliament or while walking across to the Beehive. It certainly wasn’t common. I’m not sure who started it here. Perhaps they’re borrowing from Donald Trump, because Trump’s interviews now are nearly always done as he is getting into a helicopter or getting out of it. It’s as if they’ve virtually done away with media conferences, or what in Washington used to be called the press briefings.

You could get a job over there as the new press secretary, David — they come and go, mind. It mightn’t be a permanent position. Also, hopefully he doesn’t decide that an Iranian war would be beneficial politically, because I think that’s a huge worry, and that would make your position stressful.

Trump really does seem to have an absolute hatred of Iran. I don’t know why. People like John Bolton, the former national security advisor, seemed to be itching for a war. On the one hand, people say a nuclear-armed Iran would be a problem. I agree, but any nuclear-armed nation is a problem. No, we don’t want more. But how about getting the current club members to start to lower their nuclear stockpiles? It really seems that what you’ve got is a sort of master/servant relationship in which the nations who got in first have these weapons and now say to the rest of the world that they’re not safe to have them, but they’ll come to no harm if looked after by the current custodians. I find no comfort in that scenario at all.

And now there’s Saudi Arabia wanting to join the nuclear club. Saudi Arabia! The Brits have sold a whole lot of technology to the Saudis, who of course are favoured by the West. You have to believe that they scatter their money generously indeed to those who have influence, because, as I’ve told you, after 9/11, every plane was grounded in America except those of the US military and the Saudis, the latter so that they could pick up important Saudi nationals in the US. To have that influence in such circumstances tells you something. We saw a similar reaction in 2018 in the wake of the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. The UN has come out and said it’s clear what happened in the Saudi Arabian embassy in Turkey, but Saudi Arabia declares it didn’t sanction the crime. And the Brits and the Americans support the Saudis. Anyhow, that’s not part of our discussion today, even if, thanks to the current world leadership, the time feels closer to a serious war than we’ve been for a long time.

It’s difficult to pigeonhole what makes a good leader. Successful leaders obviously have the capacity to deal with many issues differently, according to the matter and according to the circumstances of the moment, and also according to the mood of the electorate. I don’t think there’s one style of leader that’s more impressive than all the others. In politics, what leaders have to be able to do is to give confidence to the caucus, plainly, and to the wider party. But also there’s the capacity to see the issues they should be fighting, debating, pursuing, promoting. Because that’s the main thing from the country’s perspective. The differences in style probably go to those who do their homework and those who get others to do homework. In other words, there’s planning in it. Rather than the ‘Well, I know I can bullshit my way through’ sort of thing.

Take Helen Clark. Helen was never a bombastic leader. It just wasn’t her style. She was a careful, thoughtful leader who normally kept the issues clear in her mind. She was quite controlling, I believe, in terms of her caucus, but it never appeared as if she tried to win an argument by brute personality or bombastic speeches alone. She brought her own style to the podium and to the leadership of the country, which again appeared to be about getting the facts, getting the detail, getting her team to produce the data, and then putting it out in a manner that was acceptable and understood. That’s what a modern society requires. It’s certainly what I tried to do. For me, too, debating was always a strength.

Even before I went into Parliament, I always liked to have the facts. I tried to see where the next story was likely to be. I liked to see around the corner rather than just concentrate on the matters just in front of me. That works at times, and doesn’t work at others; and if you’re too far in front of the audience, then they don’t follow you. I feel as if I was a chairman of the board as well as leader, but a chairman who held strong views, which indeed most successful chairmen do.

So it’s a balance. In politics, there’s a capacity to rouse an audience with a stirring speech, but also the challenge of commanding attention with a thoughtful presentation. What I always tried to do, as I say, was to see where the next step was, to deal with the issues that had to be dealt with immediately, but to see past that, and that meant being prepared to challenge the status quo. In fact for me it goes without saying that if you’re not challenging the status quo you’re not searching for better answers.

How does one do it? Partly it’s intuition. And how does one get that? I honestly don’t know. Maybe you’re born with it. I don’t know where it comes from, but I do know you need to have it for successful leadership. And what you also don’t need is ‘Yes Ministers’, or rather ‘Yes Prime Ministers’. My ministers were willing to come and talk to me if they felt I was straying or not attending to a particular issue of the moment. That never worried me at all. After all, one of the challenges of leaders is how you utilise the talent within your team. And that talent is always going to be mixed, clearly, and you’re trying to match a skill base and a capacity to work with the various portfolios. What we used to do, and it’s now moving away from this, is try to group portfolios much closer. A minister would be working in a more confined area. Whereas now it seems that ministers have a huge breadth of part portfolios, associate portfolios, something else portfolios. Which doesn’t appeal to me at all, to be honest.

It’s sort of a grab bag, quite illogical, and not utilising what they’re intuitively capable of doing as well as their experience and professional training. I saw Doug Kidd the other day. We were talking about the first treaty settlement we did when Doug was the minister of fisheries, the Sealord deal in 1992, a full and final settlement of related commercial claims. Sealord was the quickest deal we ever did. Why? Because I brought in the leaders Sir Graham Latimer, Sir Tipene O’Regan and Sir Robert Mahuta, as well as my young Maori Affairs advisor, Peter Douglas, to my office for a long night of discussion and negotiation, with both Doug Kidd and Doug Graham coming in at various times to join us. That’s how we put together the basis of that agreement. Months of detailed work followed, but the basis of the deal was agreed to in one long night. The detailed work of allocating a particular share of the resource to individual iwi we left for iwi leadership to determine. I still believe that was the right approach.

That’s what I mean by intuitive reaction. Doug Kidd had a good understanding of treaty issues. He saw an opportunity. He brought it to my attention. We did it. That’s the sort of approach you want from ministers, that they can see opportunities to make progress. Because you don’t want ministers who are only intent on propping up the status quo. I’ve never been interested in that. You want ministers who can see a better tomorrow, actually a different tomorrow, in whatever part of the whole organisation they happen to be in — and yes, it’s always a gamble to see who works out well and who doesn’t. You always have your disappointments.

Helen Clark didn’t take big risks. She had a quite clear philosophical base, which was conservative left in most things other than social issues. That fits in reasonably happily with a high percentage of New Zealanders, so she was comfortable being in front of audiences. Of course, Helen grew up in a farming family in Te Pahu, not that far from where we farmed in the King Country. You say we both could have ended up in the other party? I think she’d disagree with that, and I’d disagree with that, too, but I can see what you’re saying. What we both did try to do was have a rational position on issues and not just an ideological position.

We were both the children of farmers, who are a reasonably pragmatic bunch. They have to be. If you’re farming, you know you don’t control everything, most notably the weather and international prices, so you have to have these other skills to navigate the negatives from time to time. I think this kind of background inculcates a certain realism in what you can or can’t predict with great accuracy; in a general direction, yes, but you have to be able to cope with the interruptions. For me, a lot of these considerations were in play when I had to make a decision as to whether we would formally agree with the non-nuclear policy that the Labour Party had brought in.

I remember once speaking as prime minister to a large group of economists in Singapore. At the end of the meeting somebody asked me about New Zealand’s engagement with Asia given that, as he saw it, we were so far away. And I said to the questioner that if, through history, your main trading partners were in Europe, then from my perspective, Asia was close and New Zealand already was part of Asia. Well, that short clip was played endlessly in New Zealand. People told me to get a map! But in fact, if they’d got a map themselves, they would have seen we’re far more a part of Asia than we were in Europe. That was probably one of the big turning points. A simple thing like that. People then started to think about our position in the world and where we were. Of course, now we send about 3 or 5 per cent of our exports to Britain and a third to China, which is our largest market.

Partly, I think, leading comes through changing one’s focus. Not even changing one’s mind. The focus. You have to move it. On the trade front, which is just one example of this, it was facing the reality that we had to put more attention into the new Asia-led order that was emerging, and part of it emerged because of Britain going into the European Union.

A chairman of the board approach to leadership suggests keeping things tidy. It suggests being professional. And that’s true. I liked my ministers to be on top of their issues. I liked the senior advisory staff to be the best there were. In that sense, yes, they were a professional group. Likening the PM’s style to somebody running a corporate board is a reasonable outsider’s observation. I hadn’t put it into my mind that way. I think we did have a good, professional group. The Prime Minister’s Department went well with Simon Murdoch leading it. He was a very able public servant, the best I’ve ever dealt with. My private office was very ably led by my chief of staff, Robert Eaddy, who was my right-hand man for over 11 years. Another person who kept the office moving was Paul Plummer, who was born in Granity, on the West Coast. He was always willing to inject some humour into a tense moment. Both remain close friends. On the media front we had a number of very skilled individuals. My friend Jim Burns was with me before and after I became prime minister and remains a close friend, as was the late David Beatson, who I also recruited when I was leader of the Opposition. He was a tremendously good, certainly the best, speechwriter I had in the sense that he could pick up the nuances of my thinking to put into draft notes. Therese Anders, who had spent many years in South Africa and spoke Afrikaans, was very helpful when we attended the inauguration of Nelson Mandela. Mandela was a truly remarkable person and friend. The world needs more like him. Another friend, Michael Wall, was with me for a long period. Richard Griffin, the long-time political voice of RNZ, joined me towards the end. They and others were all essential parts of the team. The prime minister doesn’t work alone.

Sir Douglas Graham and Jim with Sir Robert Mahuta and Te Arikinui Dame Te Atairangikaahu at Tūrangawaewae Marae after signing the Tainui settlement in May 1995. The Treaty of Waitangi settlement process would become one of Jim’s most enduring points of political pride.

I mentioned Helen Clark earlier because if you go back to the Lange era, you see a prime minister being almost entirely subsumed by Roger Douglas, changing his mind dramatically and embracing neoliberalism, and turning Labour Party policy on its head and embracing policy many saw as to the right of the National Party. And being proud to do so. There was such a chasm between what he said before that 1984 election and what he did afterwards, in particular his subservience to Douglas and his economic policies and pursuits before the 1987 financial crash brought it all to an end. Looking back, the Rogernomics era lasted little more than three years.

Ironically, if we hadn’t had the snap election in July 1984, which brought the electoral cycle forward by a few months, then the 1987 election would have been held after the ’87 October financial crash. Almost certainly that would have been a three-year Labour government rather than a six-year one. It wouldn’t have been too different to the one-term Kirk–Rowling era. The unanswered question for many is, would Labour have succeeded in 1975 if it hadn’t been for Kirk’s unexpected and sudden death? So Helen’s was really the first stable Labour-led government, probably since the first one in the 1930s, since the Savage and Fraser era.

Other Labour leaders in their own time were different, too. Geoffrey Palmer had other skills. I think he found being prime minister really difficult. That’s not belittling him. He’s got many, many skills and is still a big contributor in other areas, but I don’t think being prime minister was ever going to be a part of that. Clearly the Labour Party decided as much when they replaced him after a few months. And I don’t think Mike Moore was ever going to be a successful long-term prime minister, either. He was too volatile.

In the era of Donald Trump, though, that might have worked; Mike was certainly volatile enough in his positions and his presentations, but the New Zealand electorate wasn’t going to buy that. In Washington I worked with him to gain the support of the US in his and New Zealand’s campaign for him to become the director-general of the World Trade Organization. So in terms of Labour leaders, in positive terms, that’s Fraser, Savage and Clark. David Lange as prime minister certainly gave New Zealand profile, with his erudite defence of New Zealand’s anti-nuclear position in the Oxford Union debate. I said at the time all New Zealanders could be proud of the performance. I think historically that’s it.

Was there any similarity between the Lange–Douglas dynamic and my relationship with Ru...