Who remembers the Citizens for Rowling campaign? It was a concerted attempt by the Great and the Good to derail National Party leader Robert Muldoon’s election campaign in 1975.
The campaign’s backers didn’t like Muldoon’s combative, divisive brand of politics and argued that Labour’s gentlemanly Bill Rowling, who had assumed the prime ministership after Norman Kirk’s death in 1974, offered a far more desirable style of leadership.
Citizens for Rowling generated enormous publicity, circulating a nationwide petition and taking out ads in all the major papers, but the campaign was an ignominious failure. National won the election in a landslide, securing 55 seats to Labour’s 32.
For Muldoon, Citizens for Rowling was political gold. It played to his strength as a political counter-puncher and a man of the people, enabling him to portray Rowling’s backers as elitist and condescending.
So who were Citizens for Rowling? The driving force behind the campaign was the Canadian-born former TV current affairs interviewer David Exel, who enlisted the support of a bevy of high-profile names – among them, Everest conqueror Sir Ed Hillary, Anglican bishop Paul Reeves (later to become governor-general under a Labour government), academic and peace campaigner John Hinchcliff, civil libertarian and educationist Walter Scott, lawyer John Jeffries, businessman Sir Jack Harris and future Labour prime minister Geoffrey Palmer.
It’s that last name that particularly resonates 50 years later. Palmer, who was then an idealistic young law professor at Victoria University, is the only survivor of the leading Citizens for Rowling signatories. And sadly, he appears to have learned little or nothing during the intervening decades.
I’m forced to that conclusion because according to the NZ Herald today, Palmer is the leading signatory to an open letter opposing ACT’s Regulatory Standards Bill.
If you closed your eyes and concentrated hard, you shouldn’t have too much trouble guessing the names of at least some of the others. In fact they are almost comically predictable.
There’s Dame Anne Salmond, Professor Emeritus Jane Kelsey, Professor Emeritus Jonathan Boston (they do love their titles in academia), climate change bore Jim Salinger, old-school socialist Geoff Bertram, former CTU economist Bill Rosenberg and geeky law academic and activist Max Harris. The usual suspects, in other words - a select roll-call of the Left-leaning brahmin academic caste.
The parallels with Citizens for Rowling are unmistakable and their efforts are likely to be just as ineffectual, because New Zealand society, for all that it has changed, still has a deep egalitarian streak that is stubbornly resistant to guidance from self-appointed elites.
To put it simply, many New Zealanders resent being told what to think. That was the lesson of 1975 and I don’t think much has changed.
There is more than just a faint whiff of patronising intellectual superiority in the posturing of Palmer and his fellow signatories. In their lofty eyries, they appear to labour under the naïve delusion that their open letter may help turn the tide against David Seymour’s Bill.
I don’t think it will – not because their objections don’t have any substance, necessarily, but because the people most likely to be influenced by the letter are those who belong to that steadily shrinking portion of the population that still habitually reads the Listener and listens to RNZ, both of which can be relied on to reinforce their world view. Such people are programmed to suspect the worst of Seymour anyway and will earnestly nod their heads in agreement with Palmer’s open letter.
Of course the signatories are simply exercising rights available to everyone in a liberal democracy. But they are doing so in the obvious belief that their names, and hence their opinions, carry a lot more weight than those of the average citizen. In other words they are pontificating from a position of entrenched privilege, though I’m sure they don’t see it that way. (It’s worth noting here that this type of elitist posturing invariably emanates from the Left – a curious fact, given that the Left has always presumed to speak for the disadvantaged.)
To return to Citizens for Rowling: I disliked Muldoon intensely, but the campaign against him got my back up nonetheless. Citizens for Rowling gave the clear impression they didn’t trust their fellow New Zealanders to figure things out for themselves; that we needed guidance from mountaineering heroes, lawyers and high-ranking clerics.
I voted for Labour in the subsequent election, but I greatly resented this elite group’s attempt to use their public status to influence the outcome, and the election result suggested that lots of other New Zealanders probably did too. I predict this latest ill-conceived initiative will misfire for much the same reason.
9 comments:
>To put it simply, many New Zealanders resent being told what to think. That was the lesson of 1975 and I don’t think much has changed.
Yes, i think that was the lesson from 2023 election and will be interesting to see if and where that thinking consolidates in the next election.
I was a voter at that time. I also remember being irritated by the Citizens for Rowling campaign. It was indeed political gold for Muldoon. I'm pretty certain that I remember it being lampooned by satirists: possibly not at the time, but certainly later.
Geoff Palmer did so much damage with his wrong-headed Treaty principles advocacy, one would think that he'd draw a lesson from those catastrophic unintended consequences and keep quiet about the TPB.
The so-called “principles” were a post facto attempt to freight meanings on to the Treaty that went far beyond what the text can bear, or the signatories could have imagined or intended. But that opened to door to Waitangi Tribunal activism, and to the egregious Treaty revisionism we've seen in recent years.
Politicians often mean well, but evidently don't necessarily think through their pet issues, and consider all of the possible ramifications. They need to take a long view, but most apparently don't think beyond the next electoral cycle.
My experience exactly! I voted Labour, and in Bill Rowling’s seat, but i really resented these high and mighties presuming to tell me how to vote. May I also add to the readers of the Listener and listeners of Morning Report, the readers of the Post as well?
The Citizens for Rowling campaign was never enough to counter what was, at the time, seen as the anti-freedom ban on the rugby tour. The latter has to be seen in the context of the times and trade union members, especially in the provinces, were strongly against the ban. There were also never-ending strikes and inflation spiralling, not helped by oil prices.
I was 18 and about to vote for the first time, having just finished, a few months earlier, my stint as the Taranaki Herald reporter-photographer for a year in Stratford.
I was a Labour voter then following my parents' views. I remember them watching TV on the night of Bill Rowling's final speech. It seemed desperate. He pitched a $500 baby bonus as a final election clincher. It was anything but and was seen even by my parents as a woeful bribe. Dad, a veteran of trade union activities, said : ''He's lost it.''
The Citizens for Rowling campaign did indeed annoy many so-called working class mates. It was seen as elites telling lesser folk what to think.
My views today at 69 are different and flexible. I fit no party label.
One little side story from 1975 was the Socialist Unity Party, the pro-Moscow communist party, fielding Les Taylor as a candidate in the Stratford electorate. He had an adapted ute fitted with banners and a loudhailer and took his campaign into the hills at Whangamomona and beyond. Better-dead-than-red country. The farmers out there gave him credit for guts and not everyone was nasty to him. He got 12 votes.
I remember several reporters including me discussing him at work. Les was gay at a time it was illegal, a communist, a ''Pom'' and possibly worst of all a soccer supporter.
One workmate said: ''Poor bastard hasn't got much going for him'', in the political climate of the day.
New Zealanders were once told what to do – maybe a majority of sorts. If ever New Zealanders had a dictator telling them what to do it was Muldoon. He was voted in three times – 1975, 1978 and 1981. All the while telling NZ what to do, and that he knew best. Recall the farming subsidies, payroll tax and wage freeze. And there was “Rob’s Mob” cheering him on.
I was in accounting work during that time. Part of one job was doing the wages for 20 or so staff. All paid in cash in those days. If some staff were due a pay rise we paid fictitious overtime to get around the freeze.
Muldoon’s command economy blew up in 1984. His command economy was not far removed from Labour 1972-75. Warren Freer, Labour’s commerce minister, wanted to control inflation and the market with a magic Maximum Retail Price scheme. Packaging was to carry prices and every shop and supermarket would have a little book on hand with prices for customers to check. The scheme fell apart in a very short time.
Muldoon convinced enough NZ voters not to continue with Labour’s 1975 superannuation scheme. Muldoon’s contention was that Labour were a bunch of Socialists and Communists who would take over the superannuation fund for nefarious purposes. Though there were many other issues, from my memory that was the killer blow in the campaign. Also there were the infamous “Dancing Cossacks” TV ads.
It was political thug Muldoon vs decent guy Rowling. Muldoon demolished the super scheme early 1976 after the election. Conventional wisdom years later was that he had made the worst ever superannuation decision. But again too many believed in him. In most ways he was both con-man and dictator.
Diverting here. How different in terms of political and social objectives was Citizens for Rowling from the current Hobson’s Pledge movement led by Don Brash. The Hobson’s Pledge movement is not gaining any of the traction it deserves.
The scare tactic of Muldoon regarding the "Super" fund was very real in my opinion. In those days the checks and balances that are put in place to regulate expenditure and control were pretty weak remembering the Reserve bank Act was still a wee way away so any fund was open to manipulation.
Imagination the carnage ardern and robertson could have caused had they had access to such a fund that would now be in the hundreds of billions of dollars.
The second issue is that such a single fund could over run the entire economy and you reach a point where the value of internal assets is inflated by such a fund.
That is not to say that something could have been done but I doubt even Muldoon could have foreseen the unintended consequences of the massive inflation and restructuring of New Zealand that occurred in the 80's.
I've subscribed to the Listener for decades, but since the last change of editor, nost pages are now what I call 'flick' pages. So patently biased they are not worth reading. The cryptic and food/wine articles are all that I find of any value. A great pity to see a New Zealand institution corrupted beyond recognition. Yes. I am cancelling, in spite of my per copy cost being trivial. Our polluted education system has done anadmirable job. Few of the current 'adult' generation now understand what a Kiwi was.
Why do I do it to myself I ask but I did – I listened to Palmer on Moaning Report this morning frothing his opposition to the Regulatory Standards Bill. There is clearly now a condition of ‘regulatory standards derangement syndrome’ that manifests itself with those who fear it will actually achieve its aim - better government decision making. Who in their right mind could possibly support that bizarre concept they wonder.
I agree this group with RSDS believe they ‘know best’ for us. They come from the same collection of academic poseurs that unwittingly deified the seven who stood up against the bastardisation of the school science curriculum. Yes, Palmer is and always has been one of these and has made himself a particularly unlikable individual with his lecturing to us unwashed.
Thank you to all for the interesting and thoughtful recollections of commenters of the Rowling / Muldoon era. Muldoon was a consummate bully but had to watch much of what he stood for and created rightly dismantled.
The ‘Dancing Cossacks’ was a brilliant ad campaign for its time and very likely swung that election. Unfortunately its long-term effect, of Muldoon effectively delaying for three decades the introduction of a compulsory super scheme, has been a serious negative for NZ and NZers. The comparison with Australia introducing its scheme and its structure is so stark when looking at what the average Ozzie now retires with.
"....Palmer on Moaning Report this morning frothing his opposition to the Regulatory Standards Bill."
Unfortunately, I saw TV footage of him making a submission on the Bill. After the cascading unintended consequences of his Treaty principles activism all those years ago, one would think he'd realise that he needed to keep his mouth shut on this issue. But no....it seems as if he can't help himself. It's what happens to those with RSDS, it seems. And to those who, qu'on dit, have come to believe their own publicity.
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