David Lange
David Lange was prime minister of New Zealand from July 1984 to August 1989, the Labour lawyer from South Auckland, the country's youngest prime minister of the century at forty-one and its funniest, who beat Muldoon in the snap election Muldoon called drunk on television. He inherited a currency crisis that forced a twenty per cent devaluation in his first week. He presided over Rogernomics, the free-market revolution his finance minister Roger Douglas made in the most regulated economy in the West. The dollar was floated, the exchange controls, the subsidies, the import licences and the price controls abolished. The top tax rate was halved, a goods and services tax was introduced, the state departments turned into companies and sold, the Reserve Bank given independence and an inflation target in 1989, the first in the world. It took the country from Muldoon's fortress to the most open economy in the OECD in five years and cost the party its working-class voters for a decade. There was the nuclear-free policy, the refusal in February 1985 to let the American destroyer Buchanan visit unless Washington said it carried no nuclear weapons, which Washington would not. After that the United States suspended the ANZUS alliance's obligations to New Zealand. There was the Oxford Union debate of March 1985 against Jerry Falwell in which he told a questioner that he could smell the uranium on his breath, and the French secret service's sinking of the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior in Auckland harbour in July 1985, which killed a photographer and which the French government first denied and then admitted. He was born in Otahuhu in 1942, the son of a doctor, a Methodist lay preacher who weighed twenty-four stone until a stomach-stapling operation in 1982. He was a legal-aid lawyer for the poor of Auckland and a member for Mangere from 1977. He took the party in 1983. The reforms he had let Douglas make he stopped in 1988, sacking Douglas over a flat tax and calling for a cup of tea. The caucus reinstated Douglas in 1989, at which he resigned, in August, to Geoffrey Palmer. The party lost the election of 1990 by the largest margin in its history. He was attorney-general and a backbencher until 1996, wrote a memoir called My Life. He died in Auckland in August 2005 of kidney failure at sixty-three, the prime minister who had made his country nuclear-free and market-open and had understood, he said, only the first.
- Lived: 1942 CE – 2005 CE
- Nationality: New Zealander
- Roles: prime minister, politician
