A lot of politics is theatre. It strikes me that government is very like going to Kelly Tarlton's Museum and looking at fish in the tank. It was a baptism of fire for a new government to deal with a massive economic crisis. New Zealand was on its bended knees. Did you think 'we're in for a roller coaster here'? I certainly did. I do think it went too far ultimately. I was the prime minister when we sold Telecom. I wasn't wanting to do that. Why did you do it? I must say, I found being the leader a nuisance. A nuisance? Yes. You found being the prime minister of New Zealand a nuisance? I did. Captions were made with the support of NZ On Air. Copyright Able 2017 Part of the job of leadership is to lead public opinion, to show them the vistas of Mt Olympus, rather than the lowlands of where we are now. Any politic system has to progress. It has to face the future. The great failure of our political system is that it doesn't deal with that adequately. We have got a problem of climate change on this planet, which is absolutely potentially economically catastrophic. And what do we do? We bury our head in a paddock of dairy cows and pretend it doesn't exist. We put off the evil day because we have a three-year term and we went to remain in power, and we're more interested in remaining in power than we are doing the right thing that will save the country from suffering. So, at the root of that failure is a political failure or a failure of government or what? It's a failure of policy. It's a failure of having a sufficient regard to the future and looking only at the immediacy of the next election. We are a country that goes through periodic bouts of vigorous reform, punctuated by long periods of sleep. Geoffrey Palmer's contributions to politic leadership can safely be put in the category of rigorous reform. A constitutional lawyer, a reluctant politician and one of New Zealand's most prolific lawmakers. He played a leading role as the Fourth Labour Government tore down Fortress New Zealand between 1984 and 1990. Horrified by what he saw as the near dictatorship of National prime minister Rob Muldoon, Palmer entered politics aged 37 to reduce the power of politicians. It was Palmer who introduced a parliament that sat regular hours, rather than passing laws in the dead of night, Treaty claims back to 1840, the Bill of Rights, state-owned enterprises run like businesses and, as we'll see, arguably much more. In many ways, Palmer as deputy prime minister and prime minister was the anti-Muldoon. It seems to me, when you combine the strong personality that he had of being prime minister and making himself minister of finance as well, that combination of power meant that the rest of the cabinet were redundant, and, indeed, that combination of power brought New Zealand to its knees economically. To what extent, then, was he running an elected dictatorship? Well, he was entirely, and the New Zealand system of government is very, very favourable to what I would call executive power. In fact, with a very small parliament, the cabinet under first-past-the-post could dominate the parliament very easily, get its own way on everything. All it needed to do was convince the government caucus that they should do something, and it would happen. Tell me about the extents of power that this man had. Well, we had a piece of legislation called the Economic Stabilisation Act. That act meant that you could regulate every facet of the New Zealand economy without resort to parliament. You could control wages; you could control prices; you could control interest rates; you could control remuneration. We even had a thing called carless days at one point. I mean, this was an economy that no young New Zealand would ever recognise. You couldn't import things into New Zealand unless you had an import licence. You couldn't exchange your money freely. The exchange rate was fixed, and it was very hard to get money to go overseas. You had to apply to the bank. There was` The imports that came in were heavily restricted. This was not a free economy. This was able to be done by Muldoon without parliament sitting for months on end. When I first went to the parliament, it sat about four or five months a year at most, and didn't start sitting till about May, when traditionally it was understood the cows were dried off and that was the time when parliament could sit. Was that seriously why it was`? Well, who knows? It was lost in the mists of history, but it's never convenient to the executive government to have parliament sitting. Even a measure which was supposed to open up a democracy, like the Official Information Act 1982, passed at around 4.30 in the morning, so this was the time where, literally, legislation was passed by men, largely... Yeah. ...in the dead of night. In the dead of night. And we` I campaigned very heavily against this before I got into parliament and after. I remember Marilyn Waring coming into the parliament for some of the debates at that time with great blankets, so she could go to sleep during the debate. You talked about some of the big powers that Muldoon had, and sometimes it's the little examples that are very telling too. There's a story about when you and David Lange took over as deputy leader and leader and went to sort out the furniture. What happened? Well, Charles Littlejohn, who was the Clerk of the House ordered a new suite of furniture so people who came to my office could sit down. Muldoon as minister of charge of the legislative department countermanded it. There you have an executive of the government saying to the parliament, 'I will decide as executive what will happen in this parliament to an opposition member.' That is an outrage in constitutional terms, and one of the things we did was to stop that by setting up the Parliamentary Service Commission, which remains to this day. Was there a parallel anywhere else in the democratic world at that time? I didn't know of one, and you see, as one famous Australian constitutional lawyer said, and it remains the case even under MMP in New Zealand, that New Zealand is an executive paradise. The sovereignty of parliament in New Zealand, which means parliament can pass any law it likes, it's actually the sovereignty of the executive, not of the parliament. And that is why so many opposition MPs have such a frustrating life, because they have very little influence over anything. It says something interesting about your approach to power, that you sought power to reduce the power of government. Well, that's true, but that's the duly if you elect a constitutional lawyer to parliament. You say that our current arrangements pose dangers to the peace, order and good government of New Zealand if demagogues take over. Yes, I believe that. Look at what's going on in the United States right now with Trump. If he's not a demagogue, I haven't seen one. And` So` It's a very fragile system. Until you've had the levers of power at your disposal, you don't realise how fragile democracy is. Why is it so important? Well, because New Zealanders are on the whole kept in a state of constitutional ignorance, because they don't know they've got a constitution, and the difficulty is they can't find it. It's in so many different places. You cannot locate the New Zealand constitution in one place. It's in some UK statutes, in some New Zealand statutes. It's in some prerogative instruments. It's even in standing orders of the parliament. And the result of that is that nobody knows where to look. We've got 25% of the people in this country who were not born here. In Auckland, the figure is about 40%. And the system is built on unwritten conventions, which they said in the 1960s when they examined this question, 'We don't need a written constitution because we're British.' But, hello, we don't have that shared heritage any more. So what would happen if we had a modern-day Muldoon? What would happen is that he could carry a lot more before him than one would hope, and that is the danger of having a constitution where anything goes. I don't blame the New Zealand public for not being concerned about their constitution, because they can't find it, and if you don't keep your constitutional machinery in good order and condition, you will find that your democratic rights slowly ebb away. But it is still true, isn't it, that parliament can pass any law it likes no matter how... Yes, it is true. ...bad it is? And I'm absolutely opposed to that. Are you still fighting Muldoon, then? No, I don't think it's Muldoon; I'm fighting the system. Rob Muldoon, probably drunk at the time, called a snap election for July 1984. It doesn't give you much time to run up to an election, Prime Minister. It doesn't give my opponents much time to run up to an election, does it? He lost, and the incoming Labour government unleashed a blitz of economic liberalisation ` it was nicknamed Rogernomics after finance minister Roger Douglas ` and opened the New Zealand economy, but it alarmed many in Labour's own ranks. The battles to come helped shape modern New Zealand, but the first fight Labour faced was with the outgoing prime minister. Clinging to power, Muldoon refused the request of the incoming government to devalue the currency. Geoffrey Palmer was deputy prime minister and in the thick of the action. This was as close as New Zealand ever came to a major constitutional crisis. The Reserve Bank wouldn't open the exchange (CHUCKLES) markets so long as the situation continued. It only lasted two or three days, but it was really frightening. It was a baptism of fire for a new government ` not even sworn in at this juncture ` to deal with a massive economic crisis. New Zealand was on its bended knees. Our economy was in the wrecking yard, and it was` People have forgotten how desperate it was. Did you think 'we're in for a roller coaster here' at that point? I did. I certainly did. And we knew` I mean, we had massive deficits at that time. I remember Muldoon saying that the public wouldn't understand a deficit if they tripped over it on a dark night. But you can't go on spending money you haven't go, and that's what we were doing. I mean, we had to have some drastic economic action taken and pretty quickly. That led to what I would call something of a juggernaut ` whether the economic changes became go great and so many that it was very hard for the public to deal with, and it was` It was done too fast. But you have to understand that in a three-year term of parliament, you have to act quickly and you have to get what politicians call 'runs on the board' before you go to the electorate. And that's one of the reasons why I favour a four-year term of parliament ` that you'd be able to get your work done in a more systematic, rational and better way. You had written the 1984 manifesto. Is it true to say that you knew the outline, at least, of what Roger Douglas was proposing, but you fudged it to compromise with the factions in the Labour Party? No, it doesn't mean that. What it means was I listened to the debate at the policy counsel and tried to write what I thought was a middle-of-the-road policy that was sensible, and I think that was achieved. And a lot of the measures that were taken were certainly compatible with it, but it wasn't some sort of sleight of hand. You write, in your own words, 'I accept that it was designed to paper over the cracks 'in the variety of views between the members of the policy counsel, but it was not a misleading document.' End quote. The charge from many of the critics of these reforms, though, is that, isn't it? 'This was an ambush. We did not know what was coming.' What is your response to that? My response to that is that the government was between a rock and a hard place on economic policy. We ran the summit, the economic summit, to try and get some ideas about how these things might be looked at. The Treasury advice to the incoming government was extremely detailed, and, of course, the Treasury hadn't been listened to for seven or eight years on anything. And the whole of the New Zealand economy was still in this, what I would call, fortress state, and the` The Polish shipyard, I think it was called. Well, yes, that was Lange's expression about how we were running it, and that` Was that accurate? And quite accurate, I think. And the business community had to come to Wellington to get import licences, rather than compete. The level of competition in the New Zealand economy was very low. And the levels of production were very low, and the gross national product was not increasing, and we were drastically in debt. And so you embark on this major economic reform, of course, led by Roger Douglas, who asked ministers whether they had any concerns, they should put them in writing. It appears to me that you did not ` and you were quoted as saying, 'The policy seems to me to be quite orthodox.' So you didn't oppose Rogernomics? No, I didn't oppose it. It seemed to me that in its initial stages, at least, it was a return to what most countries had, of a sort of orthodox economy, where the market had some sway, but there were controls over it. Now, I do think it went too far ultimately. And it did` Where? Well, it became an ideological crusade in the end, which I don't actually` I've had something to do with economists. I was a student at the University of Chicago. I've heard them lecture. That is the home of neoclassical economics. I don't trust economists. I don't think economists can predict how the world is gonna behave. You can put economists in a line, and all their predictions will be different one from another. I have come to be very sceptical about any economic advice, and one of the reasons is this ` that economists who operate on, what I would call, mathematical models have a lot of assumptions. And those assumptions consist, first of all, that there is a perfect market. Second, that there is perfect competition; there is perfect information about what is happening in the market, and there are zero transaction costs. It's fascinating, because you don't see those reforms as right-wing, do you? Not particularly. Almost every other Labour person now would see them as right-wing. In fact, they're` Well` (CHUCKLES) It, sort of, generated a whole force of passion still, hasn't it? Well, yes, I know, but it seems to me that ideological divides are on the whole pretty damaging, misleading, and you get a whole lot of political folklore that is on the whole` So you consider` ...quite misleading. So you can say, rationally, considered ` You're sitting here` You say Rogernomics was not right-wing? I think it was a return to conventional economics. That's what I thought at the time, and I still think it. But I` I'll` But just let me say this. Sure. You look at the measures that were adopted ` the end of import licensing, floating the currency and giving the Reserve Bank power over interest rates. All the changes that were made, and there were a lot of them ` a new Public Finance Act, the state-owned enterprises policy that I had a lot to do with ` all the economic changes that were made, none of them have been reversed, and you would have to say that if they were way out of kilter, they would've been reversed by now. They were not reversed by the Clark government, and they haven't been reversed by the Key government. Why do you think, then, that Rogernomics is for many people a dirty word still? Because a lot of people lost their jobs, and a lot of people were displaced, and they suffered, and I do think it was done too fast, and I do think the ordering of it was possibly wrong, but nevertheless, those adjustments had to be made ` or a lot of them did ` for economic survival. What I` Where I think the policy fell apart was when we started embarking on a progress` programme of privatisation. Selling Telecom ` I was the prime minister when we sold Telecom. I wasn't wanting to do that, but I was` Why did you do it? Well, I was convinced by the minister of finance David Caygill that we had to pay off debt and to keep our economic credibility. Do you regret that? Because the policy said` that the manifesto said Telecom would not be sold. Yes. You were in charge of that again. I` Do you, sitting here today, regret that? I regret the suffering that we suffered politically from it, but it did seem to me that credibility required us to do that. I passed the economic` the state-owned enterprises policy when I was the deputy prime minister. I designed the bill, and there was no privatisation in it then, because you had to change the act of parliament to privatise anything. And we` It's interesting. It was not sold to the caucus on the basis that we would privatise. It was that next stream of Rogernomics that became intense. And remember this ` the great difficulty economically that the Fourth Labour Government faced was the 1987 sharemarket crash after the election. That sharemarket crash was bigger in New Zealand than anywhere else, and it lasted longer. It put the economy into a tailspin. It put the politics into a highly difficult situation, and it was necessary to regain economic confidence. I was convinced that we really had to take some steps at that time, and, of course, it was the steps that were taken at that time that led to the collapse of the Labour government, because it was the flat tax policy that Roger took` put forward just before the 19` end of the 1987 year, the calendar year, which David Lange then disowned in January when there was no political activity going on, and that led to the rupture between David and Roger, which really brought the government to an end. Did you agree with the flat tax package? I certainly agreed with it going through the cabinet as it did, but there were a lot of adjustments that needed to be made to it; there were a lot of costings that had to be done to it. It was not a done deal as it went through the cabinet. Well, it was signed off by cabinet. Well, of course it was. And that's what led to the difficulty, because you cannot have a prime minister unilaterally disowning a policy that cabinet has agreed to. It wasn't a policy` There was a lot of work to be done on it. And it may well have been, as David Lange's instincts were, that this was not going to help those who were least well off. And that's why he torpedoed it. But the work hadn't yet been done. It may not have survived, and it was necessary to go through the proper processes. So, again, it strikes me that you're not an ideological person when it comes to economics. No. You thought, 'Privatisation, 'well, if that's the best way to pay off the debt, let's do it.' Yep. I'm certainly not ideological at all, really. And my ideology comes down to having a good liberal democracy that has underpinnings of total democratic control and accountability. That's what I believed before I went into parliament. That's what I still believe in my` Most of my political activity was engaged in doing those things, and to some extent, when I became the deputy leader of the Labour Party, I had to engage in a whole massive range of other things that I didn't have any great belief in. A lot of people lost their jobs as a result of these moves. You, yourself, would've known some of the heartache of that. I think your father was laid-off` Yes, he was. ...from the press. You know, so you would've known. I think he even lost his house. Yes, he did. Yes. So you would've known the personal cost. Tell me what it was like to balance the theory and the knowledge that the policy you're pursuing is the right thing to do and the personal impact of that. I think the adjustments are difficult. And they were not pursued sufficiently quickly in our case. We finally got a relief programme going to help people and to give them some assistance, and of course, we never cut any of the benefits during this period. And you'll remember we put in GST, and we adjusted the benefits for that. We were not about to get rid of the welfare state. I make that absolutely, fundamentally clear. That was an axiom of the Fourth Labour Government, and we built a lot of state houses. Something that people might be interested in from today's perspective. But the suffering was significant, because there were a lot of people who lost their jobs, and some of them did well, and some of them did not. And in retrospect, I would've made the landing for them much better. How would you have done that? By giving much more assistance, by giving them much more counselling, by giving them much more support to get other jobs, by providing help to set up in business for those who wanted to do that, and quite a few did do that, actually. But you say in hindsight, though, that you could've done more to help the transition, I guess? Absolutely. And part of the problem of that is the three-year term. If you don't act quickly, you can't get it done before the election, and that's one of the strong reasons why I support a four-year fixed term for parliament. A royal commission set up by Palmer considered a referendum on a four-year term, but it never happened. Instead, a far more dramatic change was set in motion ` replacing the first-past-the-post electoral system with MMP. Geoffrey Palmer is the only one of our former prime ministers who backed the move at the time, a move stumbled into by accident and farce when David Lange mistakenly promised a referendum live on television. And we will in the next term refer that report to a parliamentary select committee. A referendum will thereafter be held. I was a supporter of MMP. He actually wasn't. But he thought that the policy counsel had approved it, and it hadn't. He misread his briefing notes, is what happened. Seriously? Yes, seriously. That's what happened. He misread his briefing notes. And he went on television? He went on television, and of course, that made the caucus not happy` Promising a referendum on MMP? Yes, and he` That was not the policy of the party, because there was only about 12 or 13 supporters of MMP in the whole Labour Party caucus, which was pretty big, and I was a supporter of it, and I couldn't get support for it within the councils of the government. You must have been delighted, then? I was delighted. Absolutely delighted. But of course, after` Then Bolger promised it. Then the Labour Party had to change and promise it as well. And so` MMP arrived, it reduced the power of the politicians and the main political parties. It was a much more democratic system, but it was not supported by either of the major political parties. And it arrived because the people voted for it in a referendum. And I think that was wonderful. So, all the big players of the time that we remember ` Helen Clark, Mike Moore, Jim Bolger ` all of your colleagues and foes, if you like, they all opposed it? They did. Because? Because it was going to reduce, they thought, the power of the two major political parties. Of course, in retrospect, they have now mastered MMP, the two major political parties. Both the Clark government and the Key government have been able to master MMP by having support parties, several of them, who can be ministers outside cabinet and who can be called on from time to time to get matters through. And so in effect what has happened is that the management of MMP has been subverted to some extent by executive control over it. Now, what it has done, though ` it makes` It has slowed down the legislative process to some extent, and that's a good thing. But we've also got a much more diverse parliament, many more women, many more ethnic groups, many more political parties, much more political diversity. These are very important features in a democracy that is now a very pluralistic society. Has it reduced the power of prime minister? Not to any appreciable extent. So an MMP prime minister is just as powerful as a FTP prime minster? Not as quite as powerful. You have to go through more steps. You have to do more negotiation. One of the difficulties of the system is that it lacks a bit of transparency. The negotiations go on behind closed doors. I... I learn about these things due to practising law in this city for a long time, and the way in which the system actually works underneath in the engine room is a bit different from` What do you mean? Well, 'If you support this provision in the bill, I will support your bill.' Those sorts of deals. Is that good practice? The difficulty about those sorts of things is that the public has no way of knowing about them now, and, indeed, the public doesn't now anything about how the system of government works, because the media's in a state of collapse, the parliament is not reported now. When I was a young person growing up, the papers were full of the debates in parliament. You could actually find out what MPs said. You wouldn't know what any MP said now unless there was some outrageous, sort of, sensational scandal. I mean, this is` The nature of our representative democracy has fundamentally changed, and people don't get that. They don't understand the implications of it. There is much less adequate communication between the governors and the governed now. I think that democratic government around the Western world is some sort of crisis, because there's a lot of unhappiness. Look at the level of voting in the 2016 New Zealand municipal elections. Hardly anyone votes. And yet we've got a super city in Auckland with enormous powers. Why would they not vote? It's quite hard to understand. Do they` Are they turned off by it? Do they think it doesn't matter? I have reached the conclusion that we need compulsory voting. I have come to the conclusion that the Australians are right about this. At the parliamentary level and at local government level. If you are going to live in a democracy, which is supposed to be conducted by the people for the people, then the people should have some duties, they should participate, and they should vote. And it should be against the law not to do so? That's right. That's what I now think, and I never thought it before. When I looked at what happened to Brexit, when you get a breakdown of legitimacy of your democratic system, which Brexit shows, you've got problems. When you look at Trumpery in the United States, where you have a really polarised group of people, what the United States needs is a good dose of proportional representation. Geoffrey Palmer, of course, played a major role in bringing proportional representation here. He also presided over a monumental shift in Treaty settlements. In 1985, Palmer drafted and passed a new law allowing Treaty of Waitangi claims to go back to 1840, paving the way for the major settlements of the mid-1990s. It was greatly resisted at the time. And there was` I never got as much mail opposing anything as when we did that. Really? No. And` What were people saying? Oh, people hated the idea. There was a lot of racism in New Zealand then. What sort of things would they say? They just felt that the Maori shouldn't have these things; that the Treaty was old; we shouldn't take any notice of it now; that it was part of history. A tremendous lot of opposition to that. But actually, it has worked out better, and we've had various hiccups with the, sort of, Brash interlude, which didn't get anywhere. It's a great credit to the National Party that they resisted that and went on doing the settlements, because, like our system of government that the government really doesn't understand properly, they didn't understand the settler government injustices that were inflicted on Maori during the 19th century. They were absolutely legion, these injustices ` the confiscation of land, the sharks taking away the land of Maori, and the settlements that had been reached do provide some sort of remedy for what was injustice. When I first got into politics, they said the Treaty is a fraud. They don't say that now. Now, one MP, National MP, at the time, called this 'the most dangerous bill that has been introduced during my time in the house'. But you responded along the lines that 'New Zealand will collapse as a democracy 'if government fails to address these issues'. Yes. And went on to say that this country would explode. Yes. I lived in the United States. I've lived in the south side ghetto in Chicago when I was a law student. And I've seen what happens if you have a underclass defined by race. And in New Zealand, the indications of Maori wealth, life expectation, income, all those things, were very bad ` imprisonment rates. And if you were not` If you were going to suppress people like that, you will end up with the sort of situation that America has had in the last year or two of racial explosions in the cities of the United States. That is readily foreseeable. The difficulty with democracy is that it involves majority tyranny. The majority can tyrannise the minority. We've got 15% of the population in New Zealand that is Maori. They are the indigenous people of New Zealand. It's no use saying that, somehow or rather, we should treat them as if they're not. And it's really quite wrong and absolutely immoral to do that. and looking at fish in the tank. One of the great moral causes of the time was the fight against nuclear weapons. Labour's law banning nuclear ships saw New Zealand booted out of ANZUS and a deep freeze in relations with the US. The fate was sealed when the USS Buchanan was not accepted into New Zealand waters in 1986. Many credit David Lange with making New Zealand nuclear-free. And I'm gonna give it to you if you hold your breath for just a moment. (LAUGHTER) I can smell the uranium on it as you lean towards me. (ALL LAUGH) But at the critical moment, David Lange wasn't even in the country. Leaving acting prime minister Geoffrey Palmer to make the call. The difficulty was that David Lange had gone to Tokelau. Tokelau is an inaccessible part of this planet. It is three days steaming away from Samoa. There were no formal` No communication with him was possible. That was secure. And therefore no communication was possible. Leaks started coming from the United States and from Australia saying that a ship had been agreed on, and that we better let it in, and political pandemonium broke out in a big way here. I could not talk to David. I did not know that Jamieson had agreed a ship. He was our` He was our air marshal and chief of staff. A very good military officer. And entirely straight. The advice was ambiguous, and it did seem to me that the Buchanan could have been carrying nuclear-tipped ASROC missiles, in which case it would be very difficult to convince the New Zealand public that it was nuclear-free. So, when this came up, in this way, I thought that it was necessary to make it clear that we were going to support our policy, and I made statements saying that our policy would be followed, and the policy was followed. Those leaks that were coming out are when Lange was en route to Tokelau. Where were they coming from? Do you know? They were coming from Washington and Canberra, and they were coming from well-informed sources, and they were designed to put pressure on us to let this ship in, and I must say that they were very ill-timed if that's what their purpose was, cos it had the opposite effect. But these, obviously, at some point started from the governments of those countries? Of course. In the knowledge that the leader of New Zealand is away and that it was` I'm not sure if they knew that. They may or may not have known that. Washington is a big, complicated place, and it leaks like a sieve. Canberra does too. Well, this is the big question ` or one of many big question ` why did he not brief you before he left? Because I didn't think` He didn't think there would be anything happening. He wouldn't have thought that. He wouldn't have thought that these leaks would start occurring in the US and in Australia. So he wasn't running away from it? No, I don't think he was at all. You didn't say, 'Oh, David, you could've told me`?' No, I didn't say that. What's the point? The whole question was really settled by the cabinet without really any difficulty. I wonder, though, if it was almost settled by you before that, because you went public on January the 11th, saying, quote, 'Some in New Zealand fear the government will buckle. I assure them it will not.' That's right. Now, does that not mean that you made the decision? No, no, that means that the policy will be followed. And the policy was that we would make the decision which ships to let in, and that was precisely the policy that is now embodied in the legislation that was subsequently passed and which has led to the decision to allow a ship in. There has been no change in policy ever since then. That was a pretty strong statement to make publically as acting prime minister, though, when you could have taken a slightly easier option to keep quiet until the prime minister came back. I didn't think that you could possibly do that with a policy of this character. You can't propitiate on a policy like that. You either stand for it or you don't, and we did. And David then got into negotiations with the Americans about whether they could send a FFG-7, which was a lesser vessel. But the difficulty was the Americans having had the understanding that they'd reached an agreement ` which I knew nothing about. Would your decision have been different if you had known that? I think if I'd been briefed by David Lange on what had precisely happened, and I may well have taken a different view of it, because he was the minister doing this. I was only acting, and it didn't seem to me that I wanted to completely run this issue at all. I wasn't inclined to do that. I was only forced to do it by circumstance. It was a pretty brave decision, though, for you to take, wasn't it? Your officials had effectively said, 'Let this boat come in,' hadn't they? Well, I didn't read that way. I mean, we know what the officials thought about the alliance. We always knew that. The question in my mind was very simple ` could we convince the New Zealand public that this vessel conformed to our requirements? How are we gonna demonstrate that? I thought that it was very like a jury trial. I've done a lot of those in personal injury when I was young. And I thought, 'Can you convince ordinary New Zealanders by what you can put forward 'whether this vessel is not carrying nuclear weapons,' and proving a negative is never easy. And I didn't think we could. Like a jury trial? Yeah, because in many ways the public's like a jury. I also think that being free of nuclear weapons is a good policy, and I think it's really important for New Zealand to have a neutral foreign policy. We are too small to get involved in big struggles between big powers. And the boats are back. The boats are back, and that's fine. But they are back on our terms. Richard Prebble says you ` you ` actually made New Zealand nuclear-free, not David Lange. Is he right? I don't think that's fair at all. I think David Lange was the leader. He articulated those policies everywhere. He went to Oxford against all the official advice and became a world figure on these matters. He was told` in the famous 'I can smell the uranium on your breath', he was told not to go? He was told not to go. None of the officials wanted him to go. The Australians were apoplectic about it. And the Americans certainly didn't like it, and the difficulty that David had was this. David Lange was a very unusual politician. He was so clever, so full of quips, so amusing, so funny, such a gifted rhetorician, that the Americans could not understand his wit, and we used to send cables to Washington of what he'd said ` transcripts of the press conference so that our ambassador could brief the Americans. They just didn't get Lange. They didn't understand him. He had a British sort of wit. They don't get that. And he was so clever. It was a sort of private-eye sort of wit. And it was devastatingly good. And he used to use it at press conferences. I must say I'm not sure it was always a good idea, but he did do that, and on these matters, it used to drive the Americans spare. But you wanted to stay in ANZUS? Yes, of course the Labour Party wanted to stay in ANZUS. That was the policy. Did you? I thought it was probably a good policy if we could, but we couldn't. And it turns out, what, perhaps for the better that we weren't? I think it was for the better. I do think so. I think it allowed New Zealand to forge an identity of its own that was respected abroad. I had talks in places like Japan and Germany and in other` and in Britain about all of this over the time we were in government, and it was a bit like The Mouse That Roared, you know. New Zealand is not a very significant country, except in the eyes of New Zealanders. And the Americans were sort of wondering what the hell was going on. David Lange was foreign minister as well as prime minister between 1984 and 1987, so Geoffrey Palmer often found himself acting prime minister. That and his background as a constitutional lawyer gave him unrivalled mastery of the machinery of government. But the reality of politics and the demands of the media were frustrating for his academic mindset ` attention which increased as the Fourth Labour Government, now in its second term, began to fall apart. A deputy prime minister spends most of his time firefighting. When things go wrong, you have to fix them. I suppose half my time was spent firefighting in those sorts of ways, trying to sort out messes, which always occur in any government all the time. And a great deal of time is spent doing that. And I often resented that time. To some extent, I treated the Labour Party and the government as a difficult client who had to be given proper advice. You were a reluctant leader, is that fair? That's absolutely true. My greatest ambition when I got into politics is to become the attorney general. I managed to secure that position, and I was very happy doing so, and I` It was what my career aspirations had been, in political terms, and I must say, that I found being the leader a nuisance. A nuisance? Yes. You found being the prime minister of New Zealand a nuisance? I did. That's quite a striking thing to say. Well, I'll tell you why. There are` The nature of the Prime Ministerial position in New Zealand is that you spend a great deal of time on tasks of no substance whatsoever. You have to talk to the media endlessly. I mean, I remember getting out of a plane somewhere in the North Island, being asked by a journalist whether I liked eating broccoli. Because President Bush had had broccoli put on his... on his... Somebody dumped` Some unhappy broccoli farmer had put a whole lot of broccoli on the White House lawn or something. What are you asking me whether I eat broccoli for? I mean, this is ridiculous. The prime minister has become part of the celebrity culture in New Zealand. The prime minister's become less a working part of the constitution and more a dignified part. Even taking on many of the functions that royalty used to take on, and I found it an absolute drag to go to all these sorts of things, where I was effectively wasting my time in terms of policy, but you had to go through the appearances of it. Now, I just... And people say you have to do this to connect with the public. Well, I don't know whether Peter Fraser ever connected with the public. He certainly didn't have to deal with television, and he dealt with some very good policies. I think the nature of the modern electronic media has made` brought us the celebrity culture; it's brought us reality television; it's brought us Trumpery; and we are going to suffer enormously in our democratic countries. I just felt that a lot of the Prime Minister's job was persiflage. Chief publicist. Yes. Well, minister in charge of the election prospects of the government, really. So you had more power as deputy almost? I certainly think so, given the list of portfolios I had and what I was doing with them. And, you know, the substance and pith of government is a great deal more important than the appearance of it. And a lot of modern politics is all about appearances. It is remorselessly superficial. It eschews any policy analysis on any serious subject. It regards things as boring when they are very important. And it really dumbs down the system of representative democracy, which maybe it's designed to do. A lot of politics is theatre. I really don't think the theatre is very appropriate, because it gives a great many people a misleading impression of what is really going on. And it strikes me that government is very like going to Kelly Tarlton's Museum and looking at fish in a tank. They're going behind rocks and weed, and you don't really know what's going on there, and the reporters look very closely through the tank to see what's happening, and they think they know, but they don't. Why on Earth did you go into politics, then? I went into politics because it's the only way to change things. It's the only way to get policy change. Did you know then what you know now about the downside of being the` having to be a populist and playing along with the media? Yeah, I did. I knew quite a lot about that, because, first of all, I'd lived in the United States. Secondly, I came from a journalistic background, a family` My father had been a newspaper editor. So I knew how politics interacted with the media, to some extent. But... And indeed, you'd been a journalist yourself? Yes, I had. I learnt` I was the editor of Salient, here at the Victoria University, where I used to` Yes, and you also wrote for the Nelson` You met Bill Rowling there. I loved doing that. I nearly became a journalist. What a disaster that would've been. For who ` you or journalism? For me. For me. (LAUGHS) So by accident, Geoffrey Palmer nearly became a journalist, but having dodged a media career in August 1989, he fell into another job he didn't really want ` prime minister of New Zealand. And even then, it was only when tensions between David Lange and Roger Douglas boiled over into a bitter and very public falling out. That's what brought the government to an end. And my greatest failure in politics was to fail to heal the breach between Lange and Douglas. I tried very hard. They conducted a lot of correspondence with each other, and they used to copy me into it. So they were writing, not talking? That's it, and that's wrong. That was not right. How did you try`? Did you say, 'Let's go out.' What did you try? What did you do? I did all sorts of things, but none of them worked. These people didn't have their egos under control. And both of them thought they were essential to the government, and probably they were right. But the difficulty is that you have to work together, because a government` Any cabinet is a team work. What the public think is the prime minister can do anything. The prime minister can't. The prime minister has to carry all the cabinet colleagues with them. David was never very strong at arguing for positions in cabinet. He was a good chair of cabinet, but he didn't seem to have very many strong policy predilections of his own, and Roger had a couple of other finance ministers in the cabinet always to help him, and so` he was able to carry the cabinet with him to a large extent. You were loyal to him... to a fault. Well, I don't think to a fault. It probably would've been better if I'd taken over earlier, but I didn't want to take over. Probably would've been better if you'd taken over earlier. Well, I think the government would've had a better chance of resurrecting itself, but it always seemed to me that once those two fell out, there was no resurrection possible. Lange sacked Douglas from the finance role just before Christmas in 1988, only to see his caucus vote Douglas back into cabinet the next year. Taking that as a vote of no confidence, Lange resigned. Mike Moore went for the job too, but the caucus chose Palmer's steady hand. I did not want to be prime minister. I did not particularly enjoy it, and I've done a lot of other things in my life that` Of course, everyone you deal with in New Zealand just remembers you in politics. They don't remember the other things you've done, but I have had a lot of very interesting things to do in my career. And I've enjoyed many of them. I enjoyed being in politics, but being prime minister wasn't the best part of being in politics from my point of view. Did you at any stage think that you wouldn't take it, then? No, I didn't think that. But I did think that the reform programme had to be finished. And it was finished to a large extent, and I was very pleased that we were able to get there, because it was a very fragile period. This was not a government that was calculated to say, 'Longevity of the government is the only thing we're interested in.' It was not a government that thought it was there for power's sake. It was a government there designed to try and improve the situation, the parlour situation that New Zealand was in when it took over. And it never, never deviated from that course. Even during his 13 months as Prime Minister, Palmer pushed on with asset sales and major reforms. But with Labour slumping in the polls, he was removed from the job with just two months to go before the 1990 election. Labour knew it couldn't win, but in a panicked bid to save as many seats as possible, they gave the leadership to Mike Moore. I didn't fight at all. I had a lot of better things to do. I was quite happy to take the rap for the election being lost, but the thing` What happened` saved me from being in opposition, which is not a good place to be, and I had plenty of things I could do, and I went and did them. Struck me that you actually went ahead with launching Labour's consumer affairs policy on that day. That's right. Now... I did. I think probably if I'd been determined to stay, I could've stayed, but I didn't want to. I had a discussion with my wife, and I felt, 'Right, that's it.' If these guys want to do that, let them do it. (CHUCKLES) And even to the point of saying, 'I can't be bothered with them.' I mean, I think Lange described them as poll-driven fruitcakes. And I understand the pressures of what I would call electoral disadvantage. I think it's a terrible thing for MPs to lose their seats. I had a very safe seat, and that is a great thing. It's a glittering prize in politics to have a safe seat in those days of first-past-the-post. But I... I just think that people who go into politics shouldn't see` shouldn't regard themselves as God-given people who should be there forever. I think you should get in there and do what you can do and get out. I think politicians who stay there a very long time become a danger to the public. Having since gone on to start a law firm, lead the Law Commission and represent New Zealand on the International Whaling Commission, and chair a UN inquiry on Gaza, Palmer still has his eye on the dangers New Zealand faces. I think that public opinion polling is destroying politics, because what it does` there are no conviction politicians left, that I can see. You don't see people who believe anything. If they do believe something, they certainly don't articulate it. What they do is read the public opinion poll and adjust the policy. You'll never get anywhere that way. What is New Zealand's greatest challenge now, do you think? Facing the future. We've got some big problems facing New Zealand. The first problem is climate change, which is going to require massive adjustments to lifestyles, to industry, to economic issues. And we are not facing up to them. The second issue that we face is financial instability. The real problems of 2008 financial crisis have not been solved. They will come again. There will be a lot of suffering. I worry what will happen to New Zealand if the house prices collapse. And we are living in a buoyant period now, but that won't necessarily go on. We've had massive immigration. We don't seem to know how to handle that. We haven't got the infrastructure we need, and we've got a geopolitical situation that is inherently unstable. We've got a resurgent Russia. We've got a Europe that's in a lot of` got a lot of problems, both economically and financially and socially as well, given Brexit. We've got an America which seems to be politically paralysed and polarised. So I don't think the outlook for the world is nearly as secure as it was when I grew up, where we had a bipolar system called the Cold War. What was your bravest decision? Oh, I have no idea. Probably buying the frigates. The Australian frigates. I thought we had the fourth-largest economic zone in the world. I thought we needed for our own security and our fisheries patrol and everything else. Our ability to operate in the Pacific, we needed a blue-water navy. So I spent a lot of political capital buying those frigates. We had options for two more, and I was absolutely amazed that the National Party when it came to exercise that option didn't buy them. I couldn't believe it. You once described yourself as a detached person. Hmm. Are you a detached person? Yeah, I do think so, probably. It comes from having an academic background, I think. You haven't changed, in that respect, at all. No. I don't think so. No. How did it change you? It educated me. That's what it did. It taught me more things than I knew before, many more things. And it enriched my life in that sense. And you'd do it all again? Yeah, I would. Despite the fact you don't really seem to like politics at all. No, I don't. (CHUCKLES) But it's necessary. It's necessary. Yeah. Captions by Antony Vlug. www.able.co.nz Captions were made with the support of NZ On Air. Copyright Able 2017