Extracts from the life a really larger than life guy, brilliant funny frustrating but lovable Lange.

The hard bit in writing about David Lange is selecting which stories to leave out, there are so many. When I called on him at his Mangere home in late June, although he was quite unwell we immediately entered our informal competition of funny one-liners.
Interested in my recent trip to Singapore he recalled meeting Lee Kwan Yew years ago while under instructions from his Foreign Affairs advisers to question Lee’s policy of detaining prisoners without trial. Not an easy subject to broach. Lange approached by way of Lee’s fine legal training and how that squared with this policy, which Lee then cheekily justified on the basis that "it had now been brought to his attention that it was no longer acceptable to shoot them."
The ability to laugh with and at government policy is a great help in preventing the bureaucratic excesses of Wellington based waffle turning into widely hated rules for the public. Lange joined me as my deputy chair at the LTSA where we set about humanising this department which had the great goals of saving lives on the road but had got offside with its public via dictatorial leadership and rule making. Humour turned out to be our best weapon.
Indeed at the first board meeting he attended we were all a bit nervous at the entry of the great man, none more so than a rather bolshy senior executive the board were tussling with. With a great flourish Lange pulled his board papers from his satchel onto the table where before our disbelieving eyes he got them from the unopened courier pack. He hadn’t read them and let us all see! No sooner had I got everyone back onto the meeting, when Lange nodded off, to the visible relief of the senior executive who returned to his normal bolshy ways. I tried not to notice but after a while one of Lange’s eyes opened like a crocodile and he proceeded to ask the most piercing question of the bolshy executive, fairly skewering him on his own weak answer. Lange had made his point, his presence was to be valued and it was.
At one Transport Minister’s meeting, following a long diatribe of rubbish interspersed with phrases such as "hard wired departments" given to us by some departmental flunky, Lange turned to the bureaucrat and asked him, "Are you by any chance a vegetarian?" which put the policy neatly into its correct context.
He did not seem to wield much influence with this last government and I think it hurt him that he had no more access to or ability to alter even minor policy changes than the next bloke, but he never complained.
We both spoke against the poorly sited Ngawha prison in front of a packed audience at Kaikohe about four years back. Typically the department of Corrections toadies who showed up had no knowledge of te Reo, in which at least half the meeting took place, so they failed to get the feel of the meeting which was much more interesting and humorous than they thought. We walked the streets of the town before the meeting and people approached Lange with a real affection and he returned it by recalling their names from many years before when he practiced law in the town.
He opened his law practice in the aptly named Grand Building in the early seventies in an unlikely partnership with runaway business success, Charles St Clair Brown and with National aspirant Jim McLay elsewhere in the building. A bit later I started my engineering business in the much less grand basement of the same building, next door to a massage parlour. Rumours that the big rolly-polly lawyer upstairs was being groomed for leadership of NZ, reached me but I dismissed these in my daily struggle to grow my own business.
Not many years after I felt gratified that my practice had grown and his had disappeared, but the real message was that I was still a struggling engineer and he was the Prime Minister, and what a PM he was. Thanks to the huge levels of disaffection generated by Muldoon and coupled with the political flash in the pan of that other great humorist, Bob Jones, Lange emerged to entertain and ultimately frustrate the country. The first Lange government definitely did things that make our lives better now.
Their re-election really was endorsement of their policies, but what the following shambles showed was that without driving leadership the best of teams can founder and they did. What a country we might have been if we had taken the flat tax option? No one really knows but fortune favours the brave, and the country bravely followed him into power, only to be baffled by his meek relinquishment of that same hard won power.
WAYNE BROWN.