National 1984 Campaign launch, Wellington Town Hall Announcer: “Ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen: The Prime Minister of New Zealand, The Rt. Honourable Sir Robert Muldoon” Robert Muldoon: “Thanks very much for the welcome. Thanks for the welcome. This election is about government. Who is going to govern New Zealand? That is what it is about. That means it is about leadership, who is going to lead the government, it also means equally importantly what kind of team is available to backup the leader of the government. We’ve got the leadership, we’ve got experience in leadership, we’ve got performance in leadership, but more importantly, most importantly, we’ve got the team. The experienced team, the team that can form a government that will carry on from what we’ve achieved up until now. National is the broad-spectrum party and you only have to look around this hall tonight to see that. To form a government you have to have people from many walks in life. People with a wide range of personal experiences. You’ve got to test them on the back benches of Parliament and particularly on the back benches when you are in government because if you are in opposition the temptation is simply to oppose everything the government does and that is no way to get experience in government. We’ve got the team. The next Muldoon government, let me pledge to you there will be no extremists. New Zealand is a down to earth, middle of the road country and there is no place for extremists in the New Zealand government. Every other party’s campaign in the next three weeks is going to be an anti-Muldoon campaign. And that is not the basis for a successful political campaign in this country; the people want positive policies. They want policies that make sense, policies they believe can be carried out, and of course these policies will be questioned, whoever puts them up, and the questions will be: can they do it, do you believe they can do it? We have shown in the past that a government elected on election bribes and extravagant promises will only last a single term. Let me remind you, twice in the past 30 years, the first time 1957, do you want a hundred pounds or not? And the second time in 1972, we’ve got a new positive and dynamic policy that will knock inflation for six, remember that? And so they knocked it for three in the wrong direction. We’ve had a recession now for ten years now, and it has hit New Zealand worst than it has hit any other country. Why, because ten years ago our economy was based on the export of the products of grassland agriculture. Other countries had oil, the price went up from two dollars a barrel and ultimately to thirty-five dollars per barrel. We import oil. Transport is important to a country as isolated as New Zealand, not just internally but in getting our goods to market and our imports into New Zealand. The wealthy industrialised countries were able to move their prices for manufactured goods up as well as the price of oil. But the prices of agricultural products didn’t go up as rapidly, and what the economists call our terms of trade have been at 75 or thereabouts for the past 10 years, as against the long-term average of 100. And that means, and I’ve said it so many times, that in order to buy the same volume of imports we have to sell four lambs or four bales of wool as against three previously. For the first two years we had a Labour government. And Professor Brownlie, then an economist at Canterbury university, said the Labour policy was a policy of borrow and hope. Even before the oil shock, they let the rate of inflation go up from 5.5% when they took over, to 10.2%. And when they handed over to us in 1975, it was 15.7%. So what have we done? We’ve kept the standard of living of our people level, indeed it increased somewhat. Certainly we’ve had to borrow to do it. We’ve seen the level of unemployment go up, but not to the levels of the wealthier countries around the world who’ve had less impact from the recession than we have. Their unemployment rates, almost without exception, are higher than ours and just look across the Tasman to see that. This year unemployment rates have come down by 20,700 since the beginning of the year. For the young unemployed we’ve got the STEPs program, and that is available to all unemployed school leavers and that is the program that teaches them how to present themselves for a job, what being employed full time is all about, and it has been a great success in leading young people from school to jobs. We’ve got the voluntary entry into the services for a similar type of training, inculcating a positive self-disciplined attitude. We’ve had another one going for a number of years for young Maori, Tu Tangata, Stand Tall, have self-respect, have the dignity of your ancestral heritage. Tu Tangata and its offshoots is another success story of the Muldoon government. But overall, we have to have an export-led recovery and we are getting it. I want to talk volume of exports. Not the prices, which have gone up, but the actual amount of goods we have sent overseas. Our traditional grassland agriculture, that has increased 34.6%. We’ve got that extra lamb, that extra bail of wool, that is what that means. I’ll talk more about that tomorrow night. Fishing, where we’ve seen an explosion in effort, 266.9% increase; forestry, 76.9%; manufactured goods, when I came into Parliament New Zealand manufacturers that year exported six million pounds by value, six million pounds only of sundry manufactured goods. Today we are measuring it not in millions, but in billions, thousands of millions. And in the time of this government the increase in volume is a 146%, that is to say two and a half times as much as in 1975 manufactured goods exported. Overall, the increase in volume by exports has been 53.2%, 53.2%, that means half as much again by volume covering the whole range of our exports. I go back to those four lambs and those four bales of wool. Four for three would be 33% and that is what we’ve got from our farmers, we’ve got those four lambs, those four bales of wool. But overall by volume, not 33% but 53%. To get a look at a comparison perhaps this is an easier way, look at our imports by volume, what we’ve brought in. The increase there has only been 5.7%, that is what we’ve brought in, imports 5.7% more than in 1975, exports 53.2%. That is the success story of the economic management of the present government. It is only at times like this, in an election campaign, that these figures are put in front of you so clearly. I can’t get them into the newspapers day by day as they are happening. You’ve never seen these before set out in the way that I’m setting them out tonight, you can do it in an election campaign. Three years ago we talked of 410,000 jobs coming from the Think Big projects and that story was ridiculed. It wasn’t the people employed in building these projects, that’s not the 410,000, it was based on the fact that a million dollars saved or earned in overseas funds will back 160 jobs and it works like this. If you are employed in a bookshop, you can’t have a job unless someone has the overseas funds to pay for the books you are going to sell. If you are employed in a shirt factory, you can’t have a job unless someone has the overseas funds to pay for the material you are going to make into the shirts and the machine you make them with. If you are employed in a motor garage, you can’t have a job unless someone has earned the overseas fund to pay for the spare parts you are going to put into the motor car you are repairing. That is what is meant by a million dollars in overseas funds equals 160 jobs, 410,000 jobs. It needs an extra 2.5 billion dollars earned or saved and coincidentally what we are going to get year by year from the energy based programme, the Think Big programme, plus the increases in exports of horticultural products, coincidentally that comes roughly to that figure of 2.5 billion dollars all on its own. That is really what we are talking about. And we are on target to getting it. Let us look at the progress in another way. In 1975, we had a deficit on our external account in trade, that is to say exports were less than imports, of 599.8 million dollars, six hundred million dollars. In the March 1984 year, not a deficit on the trade account but a surplus of 1260 million dollars, it is more than twice as much but a surplus and not a deficit. That is the result of those increases in volume that I was talking about, but then we’ve had to service our overseas debt and as I said before we’ve had to borrow to some extent to keep our standard of living, and so for the March year, just ended, we had an overall deficit, after doing that, of nine hundred and ninety one million dollars, but if you went back to December 1975, we had a deficit not of 991, but 985 million dollars, six million dollars difference, almost exactly the same. So, overall, by exporting more, we’ve been able to keep up our standard of living and service the borrowing that has made necessary by that and also the borrowing that we’ve needed to build these Think Big projects and get the expansion into our economy. It wasn’t good though, when the Labour government was thrown out, because that year our deficit was 55% of our total exports; in other words we were spending three dollars for every two that we were earning. This year, the deficit is 12.5% of our export income, in other words we are spending not three dollars for every two, but nine dollars for every eight. That is another measure of the improvement during the time of this government. Let me just give you some figures at random, some of the big ones. After paying all costs, including the servicing of debt, our energy based programme will earn and save us in the next ten years, listen to this figure, 10.6 billion dollars. 10.6 billion dollars. You’ll have people talking about massive indebtedness, 10.6 billion dollars. Ten point six thousand million dollars. Horticultural exports, the new one, mainly kiwifruit but covering all kinds of other things, offseason vegetables to Japan, offseason flowers to the Northern hemisphere, and many others building up, one billion dollars a year, one thousand million dollars a year by 1990. We would never have thought it possible, one thousand million dollars a year by 1990. Tourism, we are building the hotels and we are getting the people. And the Labour Party says that part of their programme is increased tourism; bit late, bit late in the day coming to realise it, they have got a spokesman Mr Moore, you may have heard of him, chutney Moore. He believes that we can solve our external problems by selling fruit chutney. Okay, we won’t sneeze at fruit chutney, the more we sell the better, but we are not going to solve our problems by that. There was a major tourism conference last week down in Queenstown. Rob Talbot went down there, a long way to go Queenstown this time of year. But at the last moment Mr Moore was too tired, he didn’t make it. Maybe he was getting over the reception he got at the test match down at Christchurch. He wanted the local Labour candidate to read his speech for him, and that wasn’t acceptable to the conference organisers and so he read his speech over the telephone. Maybe that is why he gets three thousand dollar per month telephone bills paid for by the taxpayer. Agriculture, we are getting the production, I told you that. The battles for the markets. Warren Cooper’s advocacy is a continuing success story. He has taken over from where Brian Talboys left off. Last month, after a trip to Europe in which he visited ten countries in nine days, he got an agreement on a three-year quota for butter, something which gives certainty to our dairy industry in a time when they sorely need it, and when I sent back a message a day or two ago saying I didn’t want anyone to get the idea that the three years with quantities plus two years with quantities to be established later was the end of it. I learned yesterday they have agreed to put a review in to decide what our access will be following the end of the fifth year. In other words, we’ve got them to agree that nobody is going to say five years and that is it, I wasn’t going to let that be there in the possibility that five years from now they’d say we said we’d give you five years and that is the end of it, no. They have put a clause in now saying there will be a review to see how much we get after the five years as we keep on sending butter into Europe. Even the Irish have said in the last day or two that they very much appreciated the attitude of Warren Cooper and myself in our negotiations. My goodness, I am becoming a diplomat. Well if my friends in Ireland say I’m a diplomat I must be one, aye. I would think so. So we’ve got what we want and we haven’t lost any friends in Europe, and indeed it was the French that helped us by talking to the Irish after they’d had a chat with me in Paris and it is all going extremely well. But give the praise to Warren Cooper, who has been living out of a suitcase for the last couple of years, and doing tremendous work over there, particularly in Europe. CER, Close Economic Relations with Australia is another part of the success story. The Labour Party rubbished it at their conference a couple of years ago. The next leader of the Labour Party, Mr Anderton, went on record and said that, I bet you, it would render New Zealand impotent, render New Zealand impotent. Well, what is the result. The Hawke, the Hawke Labor government endorsed it within just a couple of weeks of coming to office. And in the current trading year, New Zealand’s exports to Australia are up 27.6%, at a time when total Australian imports only went up 4.2%. Australian exports to New Zealand are up 21% at a time when New Zealand’s imports went up 16.4%. So, in total, and proportionately, it has been a success story. Total Trans-Tasman trade has leapt up sharply in the first year of CER, and we’ve got the better of the deal, that is even more important. The Labour Party will try and sell themselves as another version of the Australian Labor government. There is certainly one major difference, and that is they haven’t got a Bob Hawke. Or indeed anyone who even remotely looks like Bob Hawke, whether physically, intellectually or any other way. But in any case, when you have a look at some of the comparisons we haven’t done all that badly alongside the Hawke Labor government. Our rate of inflation is 3.5%, the rate of inflation in Australia is 5.9%, but if they hadn’t moved Medicare out of the private sector, and onto the plate of the taxpayer, it wouldn’t be 5.9 but 7.6%, which is more than twice the New Zealand rate of inflation. Our rate of unemployment is 5%, in Australia under a Labor government 9.4%. 5% here, 9.4% over there, and that is why trans-Tasman migration has flattened out in the last year, and there are just as many people coming back from Australia as are going into Australia. The movement in both directions has evened out over the last 12 months and the reason is apparent. Conditions over here are better than they have been, and conditions in Australia haven’t picked up as much. The Labour Party will say that the Hawke government has got growth in the Australian economy, and that is true. It started off before they came in, but it has come. But the New Zealand Institute for Economic Research today released its assessment, and I wonder why television didn’t show it tonight, they showed one or two negative figures but didn’t show this positive one, that the New Zealand growth rate, in the last half of the 1983-84 year, up until March of this year, was at a rate of 7%, the same as the United States, and that is not bad. That is not bad for what the Labour Party claims is a no growth economy, just 7%, the same as the United States which was going into a boom, as we all know, at the same time. There’ll be talk of taxation in this campaign and I don’t know whether the Labour Party are going to make any promises, I wouldn’t believe them if they did on their past performance. But I can tell you that in the budget I’ve got written with almost all the decisions made, there is a little bit of tax relief, particularly at the lower end, but I have to say in all honesty not very much. Not very much. This wasn’t going to be an election year budget, it was going to be an honest straight forward budget, and I’m promising no more than that. We’ve brought the rate of inflation down, we’ve brought interest rates down to follow it, we still have a good positive rate of interest, that’s to say for those who save, the rate of interest they will get will be greater than the rate of inflation, even after tax, something that was not the case just two years ago. At the same time, we are giving relief to over 200,000 people with loans on mortgage whose interest rates and payments will come down before the end of this year, over 200,000 people. That is a substantial increase in their incomes, and of course it is not taxable. All the major institutions are now reducing rates on existing loans to both homeowners and farmers, or have agreed to do so. There have been stories that mortgage money is in short supply. That is not correct. In the first three months of this year, registered mortgages totaled 100 million dollars more than the figure for the first three months of last year. One hundred million dollars more. And so the government has been on the side of the small man who borrowed to buy a house, or who wanted to borrow, and the Labour Party has criticized every move. The same applied when a considerable number of doctors put their fees up excessively following the removal of the price freeze, the government said no and down they came and the Labour Party criticized that action. These are just some of the issues on which the Labour Party was on the wrong side. Finally, of course, it all comes down to a knowledge of and an understanding of the New Zealand economy. How it fits into the world economy. How we can minimize our difficulties, how we can make the most of our advantages. That is finally what it is all about. And I come back again, to a point I made earlier, the question of experience. I have been doing this now for twenty years, I’ve been doing it now for twenty years. My opponent in the Labour Party, Mr Lange, went on record several times in recent years as saying he is not an economist and he doesn’t have any understanding of the economy. He said that quite freely, voluntarily, as though there is something specially good about that fact. After saying that again last year, he said, I have, however, a skill in knowing from whom I would accept professional advice, and I have a skill in knowing who I can trust. I wouldn’t suggest that he trust Jim Anderton too far if is the leadership he is worried about. But he went on to say, I can trust people like, for instance, the range of people from Kirk to Harris, and when I read that I wondered, and I guess you are wondering right now too what he meant, this was last year. Wouldn’t be John. Harris, Rolf Harris? What has tie me kangaroo down sport got to do with the New Zealand economy. Harris, no! Then I realized this wasn’t what he was talking about, he was talking about Alf Kirk, the economist of the Federation of Labour, and Harris the left-wing economist of the Public Service Association. They’re the ones he trusts for advice. Except that Alf Kirk has now left the Federation of Labour, so Mr Lange is one short in his advisors, and maybe he would go a little beyond that, or forced to go a little beyond that. So he’d get an economic problem on his plate and he’d call in his secretary and say: “Bring in Mr Douglas would you”. And his secretary would say which one do you want sir, Roger or Ken. He’d get extraordinarily different advice from those two. And my guess is that the weight in the Labour caucus would make him accept the Ken one, rather than the Roger one. But the Roger one is not all that good, and don’t take my word for it. Take the word from my old sparring partner Bob Tizard. This is what Bob Tizard said about him: “He comes in with what he thinks is a flash of light, but it is only a lightbulb exploding in his head.” My goodness, well look, don’t knock it, Mr Tizard is there spokesman on energy and lightbulbs. And that is what they are going to try and form a government out of if they are elected. But the real policy will be made by what they call the joint Council of Labour. And that is the body that is formerly set up to make policy for a Labour government, and it has been meeting more frequently in recent years. The whole of the Federation of Labour Executive sits on it. They meet quarterly, and the remaining membership is the Labour Party leader and his deputy, with senior party officials and a caucus representative. And on the Federation of Labour executive at the moment, and that means on the joint Council of Labour, you’ve got no less than three members of the extreme left: Ken Douglas, Bill Anderson, Rob Campbell. You’ve got the three of them, it would be the Socialist Unity Party because of the intellectual commitment and energy of those three that would be determining Labour Party policy if they ever became the government. Now many people would say, no, surely not. But this is the joint Council of Labour set up deliberately to meld in the trade union movement and the parliamentary Labour Party so that whatever policies they have are acceptable to both. And that is what the public would be electing if they voted Labour. Anderson, Bill Anderson, normally stands against me in Tamaki, but this time he is not. No, he doesn’t get any votes, but he stands. He is devoting himself totally to getting a change in government. And that brings us to Marsden Point. A black episode in the history of New Zealand industrial relations. One could say, philosophically, that something like this is needed, every once in a while, to tell the younger people finally what it is all about. Go back thirty years. The rape of Hungary, that has faded from the memory. Then we had Czechoslovakia a bit later. And we had forgotten that unless we are reminded of it. And that told a new generation something about communist brutality. More recently we’ve seen the Solidarity movement in Poland and we’ve seen Anderson, Douglas and company come out on the side of the Soviets and the Polish government against Lech Walesa, when they were fighting for freedom. And more recently again we’ve seen the invasion of Afghanistan and finally the brutal and callous destruction of a Korean airliner and all its passengers and crew. And that surely says something to our young people, who didn’t know, didn’t see or had forgotten those earlier episodes. It is not a question of the Russians being people just like ourselves. The fact is that the communist system has no regard whatsoever for normal human decencies at whatever level you like to pitch it. You will not ever see the government of the Soviet Union go to the people, as I am doing right now, you will never see that under that system. You’ll never see them go as I am, because I want the people to endorse the policies of my government. And I repeat, that their direct representatives, sit on the joint Council of Labour with the New Zealand Parliamentary Labour Party making policy, and would do so if you had a Labour government. The viciousness of Marsden Point was lead by a man called Alex McLean, a life-time communist. Go back to 1975, remember the controversial television advertisement of the National Party. The little union that was putting the factories out of action one by one, while the Cossacks danced across the screen. Who was the leader of that union? None other than the same Alex McLean, none other than the same Alex McLean. Maybe we failed as a government in that he is still there as a union official, but we didn’t fail over Marsden Point, we didn’t fail over Marsden Point. We got to the position where the court said those eight men could work, and the communist led union said they couldn’t, and three thousand men, almost all of whom simply wanted to go back on the job and earn some pay was denied that right. So my government passed some law, and today they are back and the reports from Marsden Point say that the job is proceeding at a faster pace than ever before. This time Mr Alex McLean and his communist mates didn’t win. But with a Labour government surely the story would be different. We had no help from them on that matter, and by the same token the joint Council of Labour has already forced the Labour Party to say that if they become the government we’ll have compulsory unionism again. Thousands of workers, one end of the country to the other, have left unions which gave them nothing, have left those unions during recent months. The promise of the Labour Party is that if they become the government, those people will be forced back into unions, their fees taken from them compulsorily, and in many, many cases they’ll get nothing whatsoever in return. Bill Anderson’s own union, the Engine Drivers and Fireman’s Union, had the affrontery just a few weeks ago, to put up its union subscription from $2.75 per week to $4, an increase of $1.25 per week, almost a 50% increase, and why did they do it? Bill Anderson’s son Carl, second name Marx I’ve no doubt, has worked for the union part-time and they want to take him on full-time. And so they put the fees up 50% to take the son of the boss on, full time. I have no doubt what he will be doing in the next few weeks, he’ll be working for the Labour Party along with his father. I’ve supported and advocated voluntary unionism for the last 40 years. I regard it as one of the more important achievements of my government that we have finally got rid of compulsion in my time as Prime Minister, and as long as I am Prime Minister it is not going to come back. Let’s go a step further with the impact of the extreme left on the Labour Party. Over in Australia, Bob Hawke came into power with a promise to review the ANZUS Treaty. It was a promise which the left-wing of the Labor Party saw as taking Australia out of ANZUS and we’ve got almost exactly the same situation here at the present time. Bob Hawke had the fortitude as Prime Minister to stand up to his left wing. He carried out the promise alright. They reviewed ANZUS, and having reviewed it left it exactly as it was, except that he went further than even Malcolm Fraser in saying that American warships with nuclear propulsion can come into Australian ports and it is necessary for the United States to take its tactical nuclear weapons by air to its Indian Ocean bases, and those aircraft can land in Australia so long as they don’t stay. He subsequent said, yes, I know, that some of the American facilities in Australia could be nuclear targets, but we accept that risk as part of our joint defence strategy. That is an Australian Labor Prime Minister, but an Australian, I underline, not a New Zealand Labour leader. What a difference here. The leader of the New Zealand Labour Party, in Washington earlier this year, said personally I do not agree with the policy of excluding nuclear propelled vessels, but that may not be Labour Party policy. He said that in January of this year. I don’t agree with it, I wouldn’t exclude them, but I think the party’s policy is different; he wasn’t quite sure. He knows very well he couldn’t persuade them last year, he knows very well he will never be able to persuade them if the left-wing want it otherwise. And of course under the rule, which the Labour Party has, it says that every member has got to vote in the House in accordance with the resolution passed in the Labour caucus; he dutifully trooped into the voting lobby and voted for Prebble’s bill, which would have meant the end of ANZUS. In 1976, at my first South Pacific forum, which was held in Rotorua and which I chaired, we unanimously passed a resolution that the nations of the forum are opposed to nuclear weapons in every form, that we will not manufacture them, use them or store them in our territory, but that nothing in this resolution affects the passage of vessels on the high seas or existing defence treaties. That was unanimously the view of the forum countries, it remains their attitude all 13 of us, and suggestions in the last year or two that we alter this policy have tripped over the fact than no alternative policy, no alternative formula, has been possible to devise. When I talk with President Reagan, and members of his cabinet in the cabinet room in the White House in February of this year, we discussed this issue. I’ve talked to members of the cabinet one by one, on all kinds of issues. Our problems of access to the American markets, the initiatives I and others have taken to try and clean up this terrible debt crisis we have got around the world, excessive protectionism, we talked about that. Then we had a meeting, after I had a private meeting with him, I had a meeting in the cabinet room with members of his cabinet present. And I talked to him about this nuclear issue. I’ve met him twice now, I spent the best part of a day with him twice. He gave me his personal commitment, he said I want to negotiate with the Soviet Union right down to zero on nuclear weapons, and I’ve seen enough of him to believe him. I want to negotiate right down to zero, but unilateral disarmament is not the answer and cannot be. Just a week ago, I stood on this platform, in front of the annual conference of the Returned Serviceman’s Association, right here. They are showing the marks of the years, most of them. I lost five years of my life during World War II and I gained the best education I ever had, I was one of the lucky ones. My best friend lost his life in the skies over Britain, and I am not going to let him, and all the other young New Zealanders down on this issue. That I promise you. Not I, nor my government, anymore than Bob Hawke in Australia, and I say to the leader of the Labour Party and all the other parties, make it an issue at this election if you wish and I and my colleagues and my party will stand up to you. Make it an issue if you wish. I’ve spoken tonight on the principle issues. The principle issues, not all the issues. The ones that I think are going to be in the forefront of the debate during the next three weeks. There’ll be lots of others, and some that I haven’t mentioned tonight I’ll be dealing with as we travel around the country. But I come back finally to the beginning. This election is fought on one vital issue: government, government. Who is going to govern this country for the next three years. Interjection: National, Muldoon: Absolutely, thank you. This man puts his finger on it. It is not Rob Muldoon, it is not the cabinet, it is not even the government caucus, it is National, it is National. It is an amalgam of all the thinking of 200,000 New Zealanders who join the National Party in an election year, all their thinking coming together, to create a party, a government, that represents what ordinary New Zealanders think about their country and the way it should be governed. A broad spectrum party, not a sectional party, not a party of the trade unions, not a party of the extreme left or influenced by them, but a broad spectrum party, not an extremist party, very much a middle of the road party, as represented here tonight, as represented here tonight. Sir, you put your finger right on it. Three weeks from now, we are going to have another National government for another three years. We know what we are doing because we have been doing it for a long time. The early part of my address I told you some of that. I’ll be elaborating on that as we go around. The issues I’ve given to you tonight are the issues. Let me end on this note. I went to the football at Eden Park on Saturday. I enjoyed the game. We won. But I’m going to tell you if this is a testimonial, I had no difficulty finding my seat. Text: New Zealand, you’re winning. New Zealand, you’re winning. Announcer: “This is a time when we debate the issues which divide us, but we should not forget those things which also unite us. Nothing unites us as a nation, more strongly than our ability to win… against all odds.” New Zealand, you’re winning. Vote National July 14.