Published in the National Business Review of 16 July 2004
On the morning of Saturday 14 July 1984, I woke to a telephone call from Rob Muldoon's press secretary Sef Hao'uli to say that the PM was holding a media conference at 9 o'clock that morning.

It was 8 am. Campaigning had ended. I'd traveled with the Prime Minister for the previous three weeks. The night before I'd sat in the old TVNZ studio in Shortland Street concluding the election round up live to camera with words to the effect that if the polls were right, 'by this time tomorrow night we will have a Labour government in power with a reasonable majority'.

Memories of the remainder of the evening are a little faint now, and the phone call was literally a wake up call. What could possibly be happening? Sef was unforthcoming, which the traveling media party had discovered usually meant that he didn't know.

A somewhat disheveled collection of journos duly assembled in a conference room at the South Pacific Hotel, where Muldoon kept a suite.

Muldoon walked in, wearing a mid grey suit which matched his complexion, but still looking fresher than most of us. He sat down saying, "I don't know why we're here. I've got nothing to say and as it's election day you can't publish it anyway".

Someone piped up, "we thought that you wanted to talk to us/"

"I thought you people wanted to talk to me," growled Muldoon, "Sef, why are we here?"

Mr Hao'uli explained that as we had had a 9am media conference almost every day of the campaign, he thought this was just normal procedure.

It was a tiresome denouement to an election campaign that had seen Muldoon, the once great orator, bore his audiences with long explanations about our continuing ability to borrow money overseas on favourable terms. The presumption being that it was still ok to live beyond our means.

"We have behind this curtain a Prime Minister", Lange's introducer at his Mangere HQ intoned later that night, before Lange resplendent in a dark three piece suit fashionable at the time led a reluctant Naomi Lange by the hand to centre stage.

While Lange was rejoicing in victory, in Wellington Treasury Secretary Bernie Galvin and Rod Deane then of the Reserve Bank had been having earnest conversations about the outflow of money from New Zealand since the election was called.

On Sunday, the pair flew to Auckland to brief the new PM. The Reserve Bank closed the foreign exchange market to prevent further capital flight.

Something had to be done - and quickly. The logical option was devaluation, an option previously well signaled by Roger Douglas, although Labour did not trumpet this during the campaign.

It did not need to. As Jim Bolger wryly noted this year "many ordinary New Zealanders may have missed the policy signals but the (financial) market did not."

The media's focus was not much on the currency. Apart from the election aftermath there were other significant happenings.

Sunday 15 July, US Secretary of State George Shultz arrived at a rainy and windswept Wellington tarmac for a scheduled ANZUS council meeting with the foreign ministers of New Zealand and Australia, Warren Cooper and Bill Hayden respectively

The next day, Mr Lange met Mr Shultz in his office. Accounts of whether Lange asked for time to deal with the party over the nuclear ships issue vary. The Americans, from Shultz down, are adamant that he did. Lange, supported by the then Secretary of Foreign Affairs Mervyn Norrish, disagree.

Mr Norrish told the Conference on the fourth Labour Government in April this year that Mr Schultz "convinced himself" that Mr Lange had indicated that he would achieve a change in Labour's policy. "I did not interpret Mr Lange's comments that way", Mr Norrish said.

On Tuesday Labour's caucus elected its Cabinet, a move brought forward as Michael Bassett describes because "Jim Anderton was circling Parliament Buildings, (seeking) to put off the selection of the new cabinet as long as possible in the hope that he could muster a majority amongst the new Labour caucus against devaluation."

On the evening of Monday 16 July the so-called constitutional crisis began. Muldoon sat in his suit and slippers at Vogel House and said in a television interview that he refused to devalue the dollar. He then headed upstairs to watch Hill Street Blues.

Lange demolished this stance on EyewitnessNews the same night. A cabal of National Ministers met in Jim McLay's office on Tuesday morning and agreed to tell Muldoon he had to do as Labour wished. Muldoon agreed against a Greek chorus led by Geoffrey Palmer proclaiming this a constitutional crisis of the most profound kind.

My own view is that if this were a crisis it wasn't a very big one. It was certainly over very quickly. Muldoon agreed to implement Labour's decisions, and the new Cabinet ordered devaluation at its first meeting immediately after its election.

In four days events rather than the actors set the course of the first term of the fourth Labour Government.

The dollar was devalued, wage and price controls were retained, and Lange and Douglas got the Cabinet they wanted - and that included shutting out Mr Anderton and Helen Clark.

Possible changes to the nuclear policy were parked for later attention, and as was later revealed, this was reserved for the personal and private attention of the PM and a close and closed circle of advisers.

Muldoon was dumped as National's leader before the end of the year.

Lange was the new Caesar, the vanquisher of the Tories version of socialism. Roger Douglas was let loose, unchallengeable and totally backed by a rampant and adored leader. The rest, as they say, is history.