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{{A|book review|}}{{br|My Life}} | {{A|book review|{{image|David Lange|jpg|}}}}{{br|David Lange: My Life}} — | ||
{{author|David Lange}}<br> | {{author|David Lange}}<br> | ||
''Review first published 3 November 2007'' | ''Review first published 3 November 2007'' | ||
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Overnight, he said, inflation would be fixed! Easy, right? Things stayed this way for two and a half years until Muldoon was, at last, thrown out of office, after incautiously calling a snap election when drunk. By this time the economy was so demoralised [[David Lange|Lange]]’s incoming Labour government had no choice but to implement the sweeping reforms the economy needed, announcing an immediate twenty per cent devaluation in the pegged New Zealand Dollar. | Overnight, he said, inflation would be fixed! Easy, right? Things stayed this way for two and a half years until Muldoon was, at last, thrown out of office, after incautiously calling a snap election when drunk. By this time the economy was so demoralised [[David Lange|Lange]]’s incoming Labour government had no choice but to implement the sweeping reforms the economy needed, announcing an immediate twenty per cent devaluation in the pegged New Zealand Dollar. | ||
But Muldoon — still caretaker prime minister, pending the swearing in of the new government, was not done with his wrecking. He promptly precipitated a constitutional crisis — and a dramatic run on the [[New Zealand dollar]] — by publicly refusing the new administration’s instruction to devalue the [[Kiwi]]. There was so little money left that Lange instructed New Zealand’s international diplomatic staff around the world to ''max out their credit cards'' so there would be money to pay the bills. | But Muldoon — still caretaker prime minister, pending the swearing-in of the new government, was not done with his wrecking. He promptly precipitated a constitutional crisis — and a dramatic run on the [[New Zealand dollar]] — by publicly refusing the new administration’s instruction to devalue the [[Kiwi]]. There was so little money left that Lange instructed New Zealand’s international diplomatic staff around the world to ''max out their credit cards'' so there would be money to pay the bills. | ||
{{ | {{quote|“We actually were reduced to asking our diplomatic posts abroad how much money they could draw down on their credit cards! That is the extent of the calamity that had been ground into us by the briefings that we’d got.”<ref>Marcia Russell, ''Revolution: New Zealand from Fortress to Free Market''.(1996)</ref>}} | ||
====In the end==== | ====In the end==== | ||
Ultimately the Lange administration will be seen in the wider geopolitical context of the 1980s perhaps as something that was going to happen at some point anyway, but when one looks at the vibrant, dynamic and diverse culture, economy and polity that New Zealand enjoys today, and compare it with the staid and stultifying one which Lange took on in 1984, one can only tip one’s hat to the man who actually did start that process rolling and acknowledge this very personal record of the events. | Ultimately the Lange administration will be seen in the wider geopolitical context of the 1980s perhaps as something that was going to happen at some point anyway, but when one looks at the vibrant, dynamic and diverse culture, economy and polity that New Zealand enjoys today, and compare it with the staid and stultifying one which Lange took on in 1984, one can only tip one’s hat to the man who actually did start that process rolling and acknowledge this very personal record of the events. | ||
In 1984 Lange’s soon-to-be predecessor, the | In 1984 Lange’s soon-to-be predecessor, the late unlamented [[Robert Muldoon|Rob Muldoon]], left a sarcastic epitaph, reflexively, in the course of being pasted in a televised political debate: when stumped for anything to else say at all, barked bitterly: “I love you, Mister Lange.” | ||
A few years on, with plenty of hindsight and more wounds healed by time, this might yet — without Muldoon’s ironic veneer — grow to be the received wisdom about David Russell Lange’s contribution to New Zealand’s political history. | A few years on, with plenty of hindsight and more wounds healed by time, this might yet — without Muldoon’s ironic veneer — grow to be the received wisdom about David Russell Lange’s contribution to New Zealand’s political history. | ||
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*[[Robert Muldoon]] | *[[Robert Muldoon]] | ||
*[[Wage and price freeze]] | *[[Wage and price freeze]] | ||
{{ref}} | |||