The Reformer - Geoffrey Palmer

In The 9th Floor, a landmark new series for RNZ, Guyon Espiner talks to five former NZ Prime Ministers, starting with reforming lawmaker Sir Geoffrey Palmer, who became our 33rd PM in 1989.

NZ's earliest living Prime Minister begins the series reflecting on the revolutionary fourth Labour government and his year as one of its three Prime Ministers.

Watch a video version of the episode here

By Guyon Espiner

Sir Geoffrey Palmer was one of New Zealand's most prolific lawmakers and reformers, but a reluctant politician.

Imagine a country where the Prime Minister set the price of basic goods. Where the Cabinet, without having to even put it to a vote in Parliament, decided the wages you get and the taxes and interest rates you pay.

That was the country Geoffrey Palmer was determined to change when he entered Parliament in 1979. It was an economy, he told The 9th Floor, that no young New Zealander would recognise.

The young woman who helped us transcribe the Palmer interview - we spent most of a day with each Prime Minister and captured many hours of video and audio - proved his point perfectly, if unwittingly.

"We even had a thing called Carl's Days at one point," she wrote, typing it up as she heard it. Palmer actually said Carless Days. But fair enough. Who today could imagine a country where the government regulated which days you could drive a car, or at least forced you to decide which days you would leave it at home?

Palmer, a constitutional lawyer, describes Prime Minister Robert Muldoon as running an elected dictatorship between 1975 and 1984. It's a big claim. Sometimes it's the small stories that illustrate the point. Palmer recalls that when he became deputy Labour leader to David Lange in 1983 they ordered a couch for their offices but the request was denied - not by some bureaucrat but by Muldoon himself. The Prime Minister would decide the level of comfort to which his opponents could become accustomed.

Palmer would change all that. He established the Parliamentary Services Commission, an independent body to provide services to MPs. He introduced regular sitting hours to Parliament. Who cares? Well, the Official Information Act 1982 - supposed to give greater transparency to government actions - was passed just before 4.30am. A lot of legislation -from the important to the self-serving - was passed in the dead of night, when some MPs were asleep, drunk or insanely tired. That is if Parliament sat at all. When Palmer first arrived Parliament would sit for four or five months a year. The rest of the time, well, the Prime Minister ran the country. …

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details