David Russell Lange ( LONG-ee; 4 August 1942 – 13 August 2005) was a New Zealand politician who served as the 32nd prime minister of New Zealand from 1984 to 1989. A member of the New Zealand Labour Party, Lange was also the minister of education and the minister of foreign affairs alongside his term as prime minister. He was also the attorney-general of New Zealand from 1989 to 1990.
Lange was born and brought up in Ōtāhuhu, the son of a physician. He became a lawyer, and represented poor and struggling people in civil rights causes in the rapidly changing Auckland of the 1970s. After serving as legal advisor to the Polynesian Panthers, Lange was first elected to the New Zealand Parliament in the Mangere by-election of 1977. He became a prominent debater within parliament, and soon gained a reputation for cutting wit (sometimes directed against himself) and eloquence. Lange became the leader of the Labour Party and leader of the Opposition in 1983, succeeding Bill Rowling.
When Prime Minister Robert Muldoon called an election for July 1984, Lange led his party to a landslide victory, becoming, at the age of 41, New Zealand's youngest prime minister of the 20th century. Lange took various measures to deal with the economic problems he had inherited from the previous government. Some of the measures he took were controversial; the free-market ethos of the Fourth Labour Government did not always conform to traditional expectations of a social-democratic party. He also fulfilled a campaign promise to deny New Zealand's port facilities to nuclear-armed and nuclear-powered vessels, making New Zealand a nuclear-free zone. Lange and his party were re-elected in August 1987; he resigned two years later and was succeeded by his deputy, Geoffrey Palmer. He retired from parliament in 1996, and died in 2005 from renal failure and blood disease at the age of 63. Prime Minister Helen Clark described New Zealand's nuclear-free legislation as his legacy.
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Early life
Lange was born on 4 August 1942 in Ōtāhuhu, a small industrial borough since absorbed into Auckland. He was the oldest of four children of Eric Roy Lange, a general practitioner and obstetrician and grandson of a German settler, and Phoebe Fysh Lange, who trained as a nurse in her native Tasmania before she migrated to New Zealand. The family had lived in New Zealand for so long that the original pronunciation of their surname, lan-ge, "had all but been forgotten"; Lange himself would pronounce it as long-ee.
Lange's autobiography suggests that he admired his soft-spoken and dryly humorous father, while his demanding and sometimes overbearing mother tested his tolerance. His cousin Michael Bassett reflected that Roy "knew how to avoid trouble rather than confront it", and David developed a similar aversion to conflict.
Lange received his formal education at Fairburn Road Primary School, Papatoetoe Intermediate School and Otahuhu College, then at the University of Auckland in 1960, where he graduated in law in 1966. He attributed his talents with oratory to the need to compensate for his clumsiness during his intermediate school days.
Lange worked from an early age and held a number of jobs; in the third form, he performed a paper-round for The New Zealand Herald in Mangere East, and later changed from delivery-boy to collecting the money. The following year, he delivered telegrams, before applying to work at the Westfield Freezing Works in the role that would initially pay his way through university. The poor work conditions at the freezing works provided an opportunity to identify with the misery of fellow workers and an appreciation for the impact of strikes on ordinary workers.
In 1961, Lange started a job as a law clerk at Haigh, Charters and Carthy, a role that had varied work and clients, including the Communist Party. On 13 March 1967, Lange was admitted as a barrister and solicitor of the High Court of New Zealand. After his admission, he spent months travelling across Australia, Asia and Britain. On 3 August 1968, he married Naomi Crampton. He gained a Master of Laws in 1970 with first-class honours, specialising in criminal law and medico-legal issues. Lange practised law in Northland and Auckland for some years, often giving legal representation to the most dispossessed members of Auckland society – he assisted the Polynesian Panther Party (and, by extension, the Pacific Island community) to disseminate legal rights information and legal aid during the '70s dawn raids.
Political career
Lange joined the Labour Party in 1963, and helped in the campaigns of Phil Amos in 1963 and Norman Douglas in 1966. In 1974 his cousin Michael Bassett suggested that Lange should stand on the Labour ticket for the Auckland City Council. The Council was dominated by conservative interests and the only Labour candidates elected were Jim Anderton and Catherine Tizard; Lange was "...halfway down the field .... which was better than I expected." Lange's father, Roy, who was a doctor at Ōtāhuhu, had delivered Bassett. The two would later have strong disagreements, prompting Lange to remark, "My father had delivered him, and it became plain in later days that he must have dropped him."
Lange then stood for Labour in Hobson in 1975, and came third. In 1977, he entered the race for the Labour nomination in a by-election for the safer seat of Mangere. He saw off more experienced candidates (some of whom were former MPs) to win the Labour candidacy. He won the Mangere by-election, retaining the area for Labour.
Lange then represented Mangere, a working-class Auckland electorate with a large Māori population, in the New Zealand Parliament. On becoming an MP, Lange quickly made an impression in the House as a debater, a wit, and the scourge of Prime Minister Robert Muldoon. In his maiden speech, he suggested that New Zealand children had fewer rights than animals received under the Animals Protection Act 1960, and complained of "appalling" rail service from Auckland to Mangere.
After the 1978 election, Lange was elevated to the Shadow Cabinet. In December 1978, Labour leader Bill Rowling appointed Lange Shadow Minister for Social Welfare. On 1 November 1979, Lange, after encouragement from parliamentary friends Roger Douglas and Michael Bassett, challenged Bob Tizard for the deputy leadership. Lange succeeded in the challenge, narrowly defeating Tizard 20 votes to 18. In addition to becoming Deputy Leader of the Opposition, Lange became Shadow Attorney-General, Shadow Minister of Justice and Shadow Minister of Pacific Island Affairs.
In 1980, Lange and a group consisting of Douglas, Bassett, Richard Prebble and Mike Moore tried to remove Rowling as leader of the Labour Party. Following the coup attempt, Lange resigned as deputy leader in January 1981 to offer himself for re-election as a vote of confidence. At Labour's first caucus meeting of the year, he was re-elected as deputy leader. After Labour lost the 1981 general election, the group, later known as the "Fish and Chip Brigade" (in reference to a picture published at the time showing the plotters eating fish and chips) succeeded in their second attempt in 1983.
Leader of the Opposition
Lange succeeded Rowling as parliamentary leader of the Labour Party and as Leader of the Opposition on 3 February 1983. Significant debate emerged within the Labour Party on the party's economic direction, following a paper by Roger Douglas to the party's policy council. Eventually, a compromise was drafted by Geoffrey Palmer, which Lange described as "A manifesto which appealed to the right, the left, the centre and the totally bewildered. It was, in fact, anodyne."
Muldoon unexpectedly called a snap election in 1984, as a result of Marilyn Waring voting for a member's bill introduced by Richard Prebble to introduce a nuclear-free zone. The timing of the election prevented Labour from creating a proper election platform, instead using the Palmer draft. Lange commented that the party went into the election with an unfinished argument for an economic policy.
Lange led Labour to a landslide victory, helped by vote splitting between the National Party and the New Zealand Party. However, before Lange was sworn in as prime minister, a foreign exchange crisis arose, which led to a constitutional crisis. The New Zealand dollar was overvalued, and following the announcement of the snap election in June, traders started selling off the New Zealand dollar on the assumption that Labour would win the election and devalue the currency.
Muldoon refused to follow Lange's instruction to devalue the currency, making the dollar's situation more untenable. Eventually, on 19 July, Muldoon relented, after his position as leader of the National Party was threatened by members of his caucus.
Prime Minister (1984–1989)
David Lange was sworn in as New Zealand's 32nd Prime Minister on 26 July 1984, becoming, at the age of 41, New Zealand's youngest prime minister of the 20th century, a record later surpassed by only one other, Mike Moore in 1990.
First term: 1984–1987
During his first term of office as prime minister, Lange also held the position of minister of foreign affairs.
The currency crisis and devaluation of the New Zealand dollar spurred on the reform drive of Roger Douglas, who Lange made minister of finance in the new government. These reforms were soon dubbed 'Rogernomics', in a similar vein to Reaganomics.
Upon coming to office, Lange's government was confronted by a severe balance of payments crisis, as a result of the deficits fuelled by Muldoon's imposition of a two-year freeze on wages and prices, and stubborn maintenance of an unsustainable exchange rate. Such economic conditions prompted Lange to remark: "We ended up being run very similarly to a Polish shipyard". Their first move was to hold an Economic Summit on 14 September 1984, similar to the one held in Australia by Bob Hawke the previous year, to create a feeling of consensus and to lay out the underlying problems in New Zealand's economy. The summit however was dominated by advocacy of radical economic reforms similar to what had been proposed by the Treasury Department, foreshadowing the Lange government's propensity to approach issues from a fundamentally economic standpoint. Margaret Wilson, the Labour Party's president, was deliberately not invited to the summit, a sign of the speed and intolerant approach to opposition that would characterise Rogernomics. Douglas himself saw the summit as a theatrical preparation for his first budget.
Lange and Douglas engaged in a rapid programme of deregulation and the removal of tariffs and subsidies. The first sector affected was New Zealand's agricultural community, a traditionally National-supporting community. The loss of subsidies hit some farmers hard. Other changes brought criticism from many people in Labour's traditional supporter base. The Labour Party also lost support from many elderly people by introducing a superannuation surcharge after having promised not to reduce superannuation.
Douglas also deregulated the financial markets, removing restrictions on interest rates, lending and foreign exchange. In March 1985, with Lange's blessing, the New Zealand dollar was floated. From 1 April 1987, several government departments were corporatised into state-owned enterprises, with massive loss of jobs.
Second term: 1987–1989
Following the 1987 election, Lange made himself Minister of Education. He stated that he gave himself the portfolio to "draw a line in the sand" against the influence of the "Treasury troika" (Douglas, Prebble and David Caygill), and in accordance with his wishes to emphasise social policy in his second term.
Lange was criticised for his reaction to the coups d'état in Fiji in May and September 1987. Later, in his autobiography, Lange stated:
There was never any question that New Zealand might use force to restore the democratically elected government, since we were not asked to intervene by its representatives and had we been, we did not have the military resources. I did however ask our military leaders to ready themselves to come to the assistance of any New Zealand citizens who might be endangered, and I met with considerable obstruction.
The stock market crash of 19/20 October 1987 damaged confidence in the New Zealand economy, which went into a prolonged recession from December of that year, and remained so until June 1991. During that time, unemployment skyrocketed 170%, and the unemployment rate rose from 4.2% in the September 1987 quarter to 7.5% in the June 1989 quarter. Lange noted with bitterness that Douglas took advantage of the crash to "rubbish" his stated ambitions to have the government focus on social policy and push for more economic reforms.
As Minister of Education, Lange pushed the introduction of Tomorrow's Schools, a radical restructure of New Zealand's primary and secondary school education system. The Department of Education was downsized to become the Ministry of Education and have a supervisory role, education boards were abolished and parents at each school elected their own boards of trustees.
The reforms were criticised for the influence of New Right ideas and their effect of introducing market mechanisms and notions of competition in the education system. Lange's appointment of businessman Brian Picot to head a task force into educational reform was taken as a sign of the government giving too much priority to economic and competitive concerns over the social aspect of education.
Motor racing
During his tenure as prime minister, Lange engaged in competitive motor racing, appearing in the New Zealand One Make Ford Laser Sport series.
Post-premiership
Cabinet minister: 1989–1990
Geoffrey Palmer succeeded Lange as Labour Party leader and prime minister in 1989. Lange became attorney-general, minister in charge of the Serious Fraud Office and a minister of state. Palmer was then replaced by Mike Moore as prime minister shortly before the 1990 general election in November, which Labour lost by a landslide. Lange was re-elected at this election (and again in 1993) as the member for Mangere.
Opposition and resignation from parliament
After the government was defeated in 1990, he was appointed Shadow Attorney-General by Moore. After Moore led Labour to narrow loss in the 1993 general election, Lange backed deputy leader Helen Clark for the leadership against Moore. Clark replaced Moore as Labour leader and made Lange Shadow Minister of Foreign Affairs and Shadow Minister of Racing. In 1991 and 1992 he wrote a Monday column in The Dominion, published alternately with Simon Upton who, Lange commented, "writes erudite obfuscation tempered by occasional attempts to explain the arcana of the health reforms."
Lange was a supporter of changing New Zealand's flag, and wrote in 1994: "[a] stranger who saw the Australian flag and the New Zealand flag outside adjacent buildings would assume that some British hotel chain was advertising deluxe and standard rooms". Lange also expressed support for a New Zealand republic, stating: "Do such things matter? They certainly do. We suffer in this country from a lack of emotional focus... New Zealand will become a republic just as Britain will be blurred into Europe".
In failing health, Lange retired from Parliament before the 1996 general election. In his valedictory speech, he reflected on the pain caused by his government's economic reforms: "I want to thank those people whose lives were wrecked by us. They had been taught for years they had the right to an endless treadmill of prosperity and assurance, and we did them. People over 60 hate me. They hate me because I was the symbol of what caused that assurance of support and security to be shattered. That is something that has always been part of my burden." His Labour Party colleague Taito Phillip Field succeeded him as the member for the Mangere electorate.
Life after politics
Lange was a New Zealand Rugby League board member and served as the organisation's vice-president.
In an interview with The New Zealand Herald (published on 3 July 2004) the reporter asked Lange:
Do you think if the election of 1984 had not been a snap election, there would have been time for the opposing forces within the party to have successfully blocked the reforms or to have severely limited them?
Lange replied:
"You have to talk about why things happened the way they did. You can't actually explain my political life except by a series of situations rather than by some carefully constructed, rigidly progressed ascendancy. You could not imagine two more unlike rides to the top as I had and Helen Clark had: hers the principled, extremely hard-working, fearless really persistence in the face of all sorts of adversities and personal assaults. Whereas mine was some sort of divine roulette. Even entering into Parliament was not one of your created, structured planned-for episodes. I mean one minute I was a clapped-out two guinea legal-aid lawyer and the next minute I was in Parliament. The by-election of 77 saw to that ... I got there in terms of the Labour Party for all the wrong reasons, for all the reasons which weren't part of its tradition. I'd never been a tract writer; I'd never been a philosopher; I'd never taken part in extraordinary industrial dispute activism; I'd not been in any of that background, but I was able to mix it in what had become, conceived to be, the new front line of politics — the ability on television to convey confidence and assurance without saying anything. And that is very important...."
"[I was] plunged into this extraordinary awareness of a crisis in foreign exchange and reserves and having to take steps that were the absolute antithesis of anything that I would ever have expected the week before. If the people of New Zealand thought it was a bit odd, for me it was absolutely staggering.... I had thought of getting the agencies like the IMF, the World Bank to come in and do a de facto receivership. In fact I said so more or less publicly — let us get some external analysis of where we are rather than one which is tainted by my self-interest and by Muldoon's clear self-interest. But it was rendered unnecessary. He put on such an extraordinarily good performance of carrying on and saying I was introducing scorched earth policy. By the time Muldoon had finish[ed] a couple of television appearances, the general public was completely satisfied we were in a mess...."
Personal life
Lange was raised in a Methodist family. In the 1960s he worked alongside Methodist theologian Donald Soper at the West London Methodist Mission in England. He was deeply influenced by Soper's interpretation of Christian socialism. Lange later became a Methodist lay preacher.
In 1989, Lange announced in a brief press statement on 10 November that he was separating from his wife of 21 years. On 12 November, Naomi Lange named his speech-writer, Margaret Pope, as "the other woman" in a Sunday Times article, and said that she had been told by her husband five or six months beforehand that he planned to leave the marriage. Lange's mother, Phoebe, also publicly criticised him, but they later reconciled. He had three children, Roy, Emily, and Byron, with his first wife Naomi, and one daughter, Edith, with his second wife Margaret. Lange married Margaret in Glasgow on 12 January 1992 while holidaying in Britain.
Lange's brother Peter is a widely respected New Zealand potter. He has won numerous arts awards and has exhibited widely in New Zealand and overseas. Lange's third cousin Michael Bassett became a fellow Cabinet-minister. Bassett published a book in 2008 about the Lange government entitled Working With David: Inside the Lange Cabinet.
Health issues and death
Lange suffered all his life from obesity and the health problems it caused. By 1982, he weighed about 175 kilograms (27.6 stone; 386 pounds), and had surgery to staple his stomach in order to lose weight.
In the 1990s, Lange's health declined, with diabetes and kidney disorders. In 2002, doctors diagnosed Lange as having amyloidosis, a rare and incurable blood plasma disorder. He underwent extensive medical treatment for this condition. Although initially told he had only four months to live, Lange defied his doctors' expectations and remained "optimistic" about his health. He entered the hospital in Auckland in mid-July 2005 to undergo nightly peritoneal dialysis in his battle with end-stage kidney failure. On 2 August, he had his lower right leg amputated without a general anaesthetic, as a result of diabetes complications. It was reported that, during the 40-minute operation, a semi-conscious Lange jokingly asked the surgeon: "Have you got the right leg?"
Lange's declining health resulted in the bringing-forward of the publication of his memoir My Life to 8 August 2005. TV3 broadcast on Campbell Live on the same day an interview; John Campbell had interviewed him just before he went into hospital. In his last interview, given to the Herald on Sunday from his hospital bed, he made a potent intervention in New Zealand's 2005 election campaign by saying he "wanted to get out of bed and get a wheel-chair to Wellington" to stop any relaxation of his ban on nuclear ships.
Lange died of complications associated with his renal failure and blood disease in Middlemore Hospital in Auckland on 13 August 2005, just five days after the publication and interview, and nine days after his 63rd birthday. He is buried at Waikaraka Cemetery and the headstone has the simple inscription "David Lange 1942 ~ 2005". The David Lange Memorial Trust erected a memorial sculpture by Virginia King in Ōtāhuhu, which was unveiled by Governor-General Sir Anand Satyanand in 2008.
Honours and awards
Lange was bestowed with the mātai, or Samoan chiefly title, of Tagaloa, a title from the village of Le'auva'a.
In the 1990 New Year Honours, Lange was appointed a Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour, and later that year he received the New Zealand 1990 Commemoration Medal. In the 2003 Queen's Birthday Honours, he was appointed a Member of the Order of New Zealand, the country's highest civil honour. He turned down the knighthood that is customarily offered to former prime ministers.
Lange received the Right Livelihood Award in 2003 for his strong fight against nuclear weapons.