Cullen Michael: Obituaries — Rt Hon David Russell Lange ONZ CH John Finlay Luxton QSO Hon John Howard Falloon CNZM Rod David Donald 
Cullen Michael: Obituaries — Rt Hon David Russell Lange ONZ CH John Finlay Luxton QSO Hon John Howard Falloon CNZM Rod David Donald 
[Volume:628;Page:66] 
Hon Dr MICHAEL CULLEN (Deputy Prime Minister) 
: 
 It gives me some degree of honour to be able to speak in this debate. I am one of the last of the MPs around here who actually sat with all four of the people we are remembering today. Jack Luxton was known as “Gentleman Jack” because that is what he was. He was a man whom I suspected had considerable private differences with at least the style of his leader at the time but he was always an absolutely faithful National Party loyalist never showing those differences in any shape or form publicly. I am one of those who like the late Keith Holyoake value large amounts of loyalty at times within this political system. 
The Hon John Falloon was one of those people with a great deal more depth and ability than they are sometimes given credit for. Because he had such an easy elegance an easy handsomeness and an easy facility at sport everything seemed to be almost too straightforward for him. In fact he was a serious thinker about politics. One of the sad things about John’s life was that much of it was spent caring for his wife. She suffered a great deal of pain in her time and John always had to spare time to look after her. 
I turn now to Rod Donald and I want particularly to express my sympathy to Nicola. Nicola has had more than her fair share of tragedy in her life. Her father Brian died when she was very young—when she was only about 2 or 3. He was actually my chemistry teacher. I was one of his few failures in life I think in that regard. He was under 30 when he died. He also was a very fit man. He was a keen tennis player and a teacher of enormous ability and promise. His life was cut off at a very very young age indeed. Then for Nicola to lose her partner at only age 48 really does seem rather too much to suffer during one lifetime. 
Rod was a great parliamentarian—a virtue often underestimated in this place. There are people who come through Parliament some of them spending a long time here who never at any point really are parliamentarians. They may be good at policy at holding electorate clinics and at speaking outside Parliament but they never show any great sympathy for or understanding of how Parliament works. Rod from the moment he came here showed an enormous ability to understand how this place operated and how it was going to change under the impact of the electoral system that he was largely responsible for—and on that point I will bestow the charity of my silence in respect of my own personal feelings about the virtues of MMP. 
What I do have to say in terms of Rod’s contribution is that one of the great ironies—but it is also a tribute to him in the last few weeks of his life—was in essence that this last election ended up with an extraordinarily finely balanced result under MMP. It was one that just excluded his party from a real position in terms of power. And Rod at last could use that suit for the purpose it was designed and made for although he had lost so much weight in recent times. I am not quite sure whether it had been made to measure when he was a bit chubbier or in his more recent guise when he was really looking splendidly fit I have to say in recent months. He showed no bitterness about that. He actually understood the consequences of the electoral decision made this year and how the Green Party had to position itself to work within that decision and continue to work towards the future for the principles the party held. It takes I think a great deal of self-awareness and an awareness about the nature of politics to be able to do that. A surprising number of people—it often seems to me an overwhelming majority of the House—seemed to spend the immediate post-election mode in a state of grieving whereas Rod I think was ready to get on with the next stage of how to build more of the constituency for the issues he stood for. 
Someone said that David Lange was rather similar. In my view he was in fact a very different man in many many ways. We tend to think of David as actually being very old because it was so long ago that he was Prime Minister. He ceased to be Prime Minister in 1989 and I think at that point he was still slightly younger than Rod was when he died. Of course David was Prime Minister at a very young age and just for some 5 years. 
David Lange’s autobiography is very interesting. Most politicians when they write an autobiography—and whether one regards some of those works as fiction or otherwise is I think always a matter of judgment for future historians—spend most of their time on the period they were in office. A great deal of David’s book is about the time before he entered Parliament. and certainly before he became Prime Minister. Not a little bit of it is about the time after he ceased to be Prime Minister. In the early part of the book one gets a very clear picture of what made David such an extraordinarily complex person At times he was a quite difficult person to work with and because of his complexity was a difficult person to understand. His relationship with his mother came through in many pages as not being exactly an easy one if I could put it in that particular way and his feeling of hurt about the insults he suffered as a boy because he was a large fat boy—in New Zealand young boys were supposed to be athletic and slim and so on until they turned into prop forwards then it was all right to be somewhat more squarish in shape—was a very difficult thing for him to live with. These clearly left deep scars on David for the rest of his life and were some of the things that occasionally made him I think overly prone to wounding people and to sometimes being less charitable towards people than perhaps he might have been. 
In fact David spent much of the last year or so of his life trying to make peace with a number of people around the place. He summoned me to what was actually his deathbed to apologise for something he said in 1986 or 1987. I could not remember what the hell it was but I am sure I thought it was funny at the time anyway whatever it was. He could sometimes say some awful things about people. His love-hate relationship with the Labour Women’s Council was a wonder to behold and gave some of us with similar mixed non-PC feelings a great deal of pleasure and joy over a number of years. Of course one would not care to say that too often at least when the Prime Minister is present. But I notice she is absent so I will get away with it for this particular moment. 
What came through I think in terms of David’s time in power was that he came to power from a background of having had to learn to be very quick-witted. He had an enormously facile mind. He had an enormous ability to master issues in a space of time that left most of us breathless and he wanted to move on to the next issue while the rest of us were trying to catch up which is why people sometimes thought he had a short attention span. It was not that; it was that the rest of us had a very long attention span in order to grasp the point. Whereas David had got there and was wanting to get on with it the rest of us were at the stage of still trying to understand what was being talked about. But I think that because of that background he also lacked some clear firm foundations in terms of some of his principles and attitudes. So in office I think he found it hard to cope with his role as the leader of a radical reform programme much of which was necessary but about which he always felt some sense of unease in terms of the direction it was moving in and where it was going to take New Zealand given his deep sympathy with the genuine underdog—not the kinds of people who sometimes appear in front of the Employment Relations Authority but the genuine underdogs within New Zealand society who actually do not have very much at all and who need other people to stand up for them and to work for them on their behalf. 
In the end David had to precipitate a struggle within the Labour Party in order to settle its future and of course in the result he won that struggle. The outcome was the one he was actually seeking in that regard. So he could be more at peace with himself in subsequent times despite the fact that he perhaps might almost have felt that things had come to a sticky end when he had to leave the office of Prime Minister in 1989. 
David’s life was a complex one just as many of us have complex lives. It was almost surreal to visit him on his deathbed and to arrive with Margaret sitting by the bed. As we chatted away Naomi came in and Margaret left and I thought: “I have a funny feeling that when I’m on my deathbed this isn’t quite going to happen in that same arrangement that way around.” But that I think was a way in which David had again managed to come to a position of peace with his own life and with the people he had worked with throughout that life. 
David will be remembered for enormous achievements in politics but like all great politicians he also needs to be remembered as being a very complex person and not as a simple one-dimensional nuclear-free New Zealand person or whatever kind of dimension politicians sometimes find themselves locked into by people who do not grasp the greatness of politics. And David was one of our few great politicians. This is often set off by other characteristics as well. We will remember him.