Inside Lange’s New Cabinet

New Zealand

Important changes in the wake of the Labour landslide.

NEW ZEALAND PRIME Minister David Lange looks more relaxed these days. Having written him self into the history books by becoming the first Labour leader to win consecutive post-war elections, he now has the extra three years his reformist government al ways needed to nail its policies into place.

By the next general election in 1990, the voters will know whether they were right to follow Labour’s campaign slogan: “Let us finish the job”. Meantime, Prime Min ister Lange has hurled his icon-shattering team into the next period of government with the same disregard for convention that characterised Labour’s first term.

The sweeping changes in the cabinet alone took commentators’ breath away.

Historians had to go back to the early years of the century to find a prime minister who took on the education portfolio for ex ample, as Lange has.

It’s likewise out of step for the PM not to have either the Finance or Foreign Affairs briefs. The appointment of the thoughtful former Education Minister Russell Marshall to the foreign affairs job in a straight swap with the PM stunned veteran reporters. Like everybody else, they assumed Lange would stick with a portfolio which in the last term very much carried his outspoken stamp.

Now, however, they see merit in Lange handing over the Foreign Affairs reins to a natural diplomat who won’t ruffle Washington’s feathers. Anyway, it’s pointed out, the key planks of New Zea land’s foreign policy are based on La bour’s nuclear-free strategy and they were nailed together in the earlier term. With the brash Lange out of foreign affairs, Marshall may well articulate the same pol icy in more moderate, less strident terms.

Though they make headlines around the world, the ANZUS and nuclear poli cies ranked bottom with voters. Labour will be judged over the next term on the bread and butter issues of economics inflation, interest rates, unemployment, disposable income. Labour’s 19-seat ma jority in the 97-seat lower house, which is now four more than on election night after the counting of postal votes overturned narrow National victories, is seen not so much as a stunning vindication of Roger nomics, which the Prime Minister claimed, but as a vote of faith. The wrenching reforms that have convulsed every comer of the economy have not yet produced the results which Finance Min ister Roger Douglas has predicted. But they must show fruit within 18 months or so, if

Lange wants to rewrite the history books again and become a three-term Labour PM. (He is the first Labour PM in 49 years to be re-elected.) Labour’s second-term finance policy is based around thrift. Douglas has always said that the taxpayer’s dollar has been wasted for years, and he is getting closer to turning the state’s PAYE income into re sults. The backroom discussions over the health service are just one example.

Douglas has drafted leading business men, most of whose business careers have been marked by the application of relent less efficiencies, into this debate. Alan Gibbs, one of New Zealand’s takeover barons, is involved in these talks and he is arguing persuasively for financial reform of health care. He wants the performance

of the hospitals, which swallow enormous bites of New Zealand’s GNP, evaluated by hard results such as by the number of op erations performed. “Eighty per cent of the budget goes in wages,” he says.

The same results-based philosophy is being applied to housing, education, un employment and other tax-supported areas. These are social programs where successive governments have only tink ered for years and, according to Douglas, it shows. Many civil servants have proved resistant to these reforms, angering some of the private enterprisers brought in to shake them up.

“They need a bomb under them,” one of those businessmen said.

Labour’s financial reforms remain un der threat, though, while the kiwi dollar continues to trade at around US6Oc, pro voking major layoffs by many of New Zea land’s previously protected manufacturers.

Union leaders claim to be negotiating 1000 redundancies a month. Already unem ployment has broken post-war records, and is rising.

While Labour has swept back into power with headline-winning cabinet changes, a broken opposition National (conservative) Party is mending its fences.

Leader Jim Bolger, the likeable farmer who fought an uncharacteristically waspish campaign, faces a daunting job of reform.

National has lost a lot of its rural base, been squeezed out of many traditional city seats, and has few bright young faces to push for ward as Labour has done.

A post-election blow was the loss of election-night winner Michael Cox, Na tional’s Finance spokesman, whose vic tory was overturned after special votes were counted. Still in his 40s, Cox was one of National’s few luminaries.

Foreign Affairs shadow minister Sir Robert Muldoon was returned but has been stripped of the position and shunted to the backbenches, clear evidence that Bolger means business and is brushing up his party’s image.

But National’s travails look so serious that it’s hard to disagree with Neil Mor rison, the leader of the devastated New Zealand Democrats party which lost both its seats after 30 years in politics. “Na tional took a bigger towelling than we did,” declares Morrison.

It all adds up to a flying start for La bour’s second term. “We have broken the mould of New Zealand politics,” Lange declared on election night. It is difficult to disagree with that. □

“We have broken the mould of NZ politics”

PM David Lange