The Mighty Totara: The Life and Times of Norman Kirk.

• Author: Bassett, Michael
• Position: Book review

THE MIGHTY TOTARA: The Life and Times of Norman Kirk

Author. David Grant

Published by: Random House, Auckland, 2014, 512pp, $45.

By the time Norman Kirk won office in 1972 New Zealand's economy was ten years on from receiving the first serious warning from the Monetary and Economic Council. Productivity growth was one of the slowest in the developed world; the government was borrowing too much overseas; the inflation rate was trending at a level that would soon make our exports uncompetitive. New Zealand's economic performance was poor by international standards. Little changed during the locust years of Keith Holyoake, where nobody heeded such warnings while a sense of expectation was allowed to grow amongst New Zealanders about what governments could deliver. Norman Kirk, who took over leadership of the Labour Party in 1965, was a creature of the early welfare state and he refused to accept that any corrective measures were needed. His files of the Monetary and Economic Council's reports are amongst his papers. None seems to have been read beyond the first few pages. Kirk was an expansionist by instinct and was not going to be budged by a bunch of economists.

A cardiologist told Kirk before he won in 1972 that he was in a state of 'congestive heart failure'; an eye specialist suspected diabetes. Kirk knew he was on borrowed time, and while ill himself, he would spend the country back to health. Labour's glossy manifesto in 1972 contained promises conservatively estimated by one of the party's finance spokesmen to cost $720 million (probably $10 billion in today's money). If implemented, such expenditure could only heap fuel on to the barely suppressed inflationary fires that worsened when Robert Muldoon 'spent the lot' in his 1972 budget.

Unfortunately you will not get any of this economic background from David Grant's book. Like so many Kiwi historians these days, Grant is a creature of the far left. His heroes are those with plans to spend, never those who earn. He is inclined to blame either the first oil shock for the difficulties that soon confronted Kirk's government, or even finance minister Bill Rowling (p.379). In fact, spending on the scale promised in such a manifesto would always stoke inflation. Sad, but true, the Kirk--Rowling government contributed its share to the gradually building crisis that Muldoon accelerated with Think Big in the early 1980s. Grant tried to inspire a recent Labour Party seminar in Auckland with a...