Analysis: After Jim Bolger died yesterday aged 90, TVNZ's Chief Correspondent looks back on the former prime minister’s life and career.
Jim Bolger was, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon said, this morning, “a leader of conviction, a reformer of consequence, and a servant of the people whose legacy has shaped our nation in profound and lasting ways”.
At first, the convictions appeared to belong more to his Cabinet colleagues: Finance Minister Ruth Richardson in particular. Jim Bolger seemed to grow into his. He became Prime Minister in 1990, after the Labour Government of David Lange, then Geoffrey Palmer, then Mike Moore, had proven you can spontaneously combust more than once.
National’s 1990 election campaign featured Bolger repeatedly promising a “decent society”. It was meant as a respite from, and antidote to, Labour’s chaos, unilateralism, and radicalism. The country was punch drunk. The Nats romped home. It was then, and remember this was still under first past the post voting, the most one-side election victory in our history.
Three years later, only three years, National won by just a seat. One seat. From the sublime to the ridiculous.
As a 3 News political reporter, I was with Jim Bolger and the National Party faithful in Te Kūiti on election night in 1993. It felt like someone had stolen their pants. The evening grew quieter and more awkward. There has never been a one term National government. As the night stumbled on, it became a distinct possibility. “Bugger the pollsters,” Bolger said, after having been almost assured of a comfortable victory.
What, perhaps, he really meant, was “bugger the past three years”.
The country was reacting to a policy platform, largely unmandated in 1990, that had been led by Richardson (although, not her alone).
Among other things, Richardson’s 1991 “Mother of all Budgets” actually cut social welfare benefits. If it was “decency”, it wasn’t the version expected. The Employment Contracts Act deregulated the labour market. Its critics feared it would turn a country in which dad would work at the Post Office for 40 years into a conglomeration of frontier workplaces.
Unions mobilised. National’s popularity plummeted. Richardson wandered the halls of Parliament repeating her favourite acronym, TINA – There Is No Alternative. The country didn’t believe her.
During this period, Bolger frequently looked as confused and unhappy as someone who suffers from heliophobia being kidnapped by a lighthouse.
But he didn’t blink. He stared it down.
After the death row reprieve of 1993, he fired Richardson.
Coalition with Winston Peters
In 1996, he formed the country’s first MMP government by entering into a coalition with New Zealand First and Winston Peters. History being made, yes. But what’s more discretely remarkable about that coalition deal is that Peters had also been in that first Bolger Cabinet, and “big Jim” had fired him, too. New Zealand First was ultimately born out of that.
That only two elections later, the two men would marry themselves into government tells you a lot about both of them.
“As the leader of Mr Bolger’s coalition partner,” Peters said in a statement this morning, “I can attest he was a man of his word. He did what he said he would do - and we ran our Coalition Government with integrity, focus and a fidelity to New Zealanders who had delivered a majority to our two political parties.”
That may be history being written by the victors, but it’s also the story of two men who believed in victory more than in holding a grudge. In the end, I suspect they really liked each other. (And there may be more than a few empty bottles of Scotch that would attest to that.)
Bolger was frequently underestimated. He was tough, but he was also devastated when the Nats and Jenny Shipley rolled him in 1997. And philosophical, too. I once sat beside him on a flight back from a South Pacific Forum and he said to me, “want to know what’s left of you after you leave politics? Take your hand out of glass of water and see how much of the hand shape remains.”
With him, that wasn’t true.
Commitment to Te Tiriti o Waitangi
What remains, I think, is his enduring and heartfelt commitment to Te Tiriti o Waitangi (or the Treaty, as we tended to call it then). Younger readers may not know this, but Bolger had been a sheep farmer in the King Country. Pākehā as. Conservative as. As far from woke as an alarm clock on speed.
And when he shepherded the Tainui and Ngāi Tahu Treaty settlements over the line on behalf of the Crown, he declared something about our history and our responsibility to acknowledge and respond to it that was meaningful in ways that have endured and made us better.
He never resiled from that. There was something deeply honourable about his belief in Te Tiriti, and our collective obligation to honour it. Perhaps it was the decency he promised us in 1990.
Beyond that, he was a glowingly proud husband and dad. He loved Joan and she loved him. They had nine children. At Premier House functions when I was in the Parliamentary Press Gallery, the Bolger children would carry round the hors d'oeuvre trays. (It always felt like the sausage rolls had been homemade.) He would stop, mid-sentence, to update you on the progress at school of whichever of the nine was handing you a cheese straw. He seldom spoke more happily.
And maybe that’s what the Treaty settlements were about – a belief in whānau. And our obligations to care for each other.
There were times when some of the policies of that National government of 1990–1993 felt almost wilfully cruel. That’s part of his legacy, too.
But when, in November 1997, as he signed the Ngāi Tahu Deed of Settlement”, he said, “as I look across the marae and beyond I am reminded of the journey that we as a nation have embarked on since the signing of the Treaty 157 years ago”, he was actually leading many Pākehā on that journey. That’s a legacy to hold tight to.
“No other government has approached the settlement of such grievances with greater determination, goodwill and courage”, he said. It was a low bar, sure, but true.
“The Crown has moved from ignorance about the depth of Māori grievance, to suspicion about the insistence of Māori leaders, to a willingness to work together to find solutions.
“I know that I speak for everyone when I say that today is a special occasion and one that will undoubtedly be recognised so by our history books.”
Yes, it will.
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