Four decades on from the election of New Zealand's fourth Labour government in 1984, new details are emerging of a chaotic and revolutionary era in Kiwi politics.
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The tumult - scarcely imaginable today - still resonates.
In a few years, New Zealand confronted a constitutional crisis, a financial meltdown and stock market implosion, left the ANZUS alliance and deregulated the economy at a speed unseen in the developed world.
All while the leading political players - particularly Prime Minister David Lange and Finance Minister Sir Roger Douglas - fell out spectacularly.
"The psycho-drama rivalry between Lange and Roger Douglas made the Hawke-Keating stuff look like a rom-com," Toby Manhire, creator and narrator of a new podcast, Juggernaut, exploring the era, told AAP.
"It was so protracted and vicious and weird and meaningful in terms of what happened to their government."
It began on 14 June 1984, when visibly drunk prime minister Sir Robert Muldoon called an election months ahead of time with a turn of phrase that now ranks as New Zealand's most famous political quote.
In a late night announcement in Wellington, Sir Robert deadpanned a response when asked whether he had given himself enough time to prepare for the poll.
"It doesn't give my opponents much time to run up to an election, does it," he slurred.
Sir Robert's National party, which had governed for nine years, was forced into the snap poll after one of his MPs, Marilyn Waring, rebelled over the government's plans to dismiss an anti-nuclear bill.
Ms Waring recounts her day on Juggernaut, from her bombshell letter to party leaders, a lunchtime violin concert, and eventual confrontation with Sir Robert.
"What do you think you're up to now, you perverted little liar?" Ms Waring recalls Sir Robert telling her.
She responded by eating a piece of fruit "while he just raved on".
"If he's going to be a total pig, I'm going to eat an apple," she said.
As the government collapsed, Ms Waring first hid, then escaped, and not seeking re-election, spent the election campaign in Australia.
"I locked the door to my room ... the press all came clambering to the door and I moved a table against the door and got under the desk," she said.
The amusing anecdote, punctuated to outline Sir Robert's legendary alcohol intake - including several brandy and gingers, and at least two glasses of whiskey - is one of many recalled in Juggernaut.
"There are so many fascinating episodes. It's such a rich seam of drama all the way through," Mr Manhire said.
The first of those dramas confronted by Labour after winning the 14 July election, was a financial and constitutional crisis caused by Sir Robert's failure to yield power and devalue the Kiwi dollar after losing office.
A series of Labour reforms upended kiwi society.
The NZ dollar was devalued then floated, agricultural subsidies were axed, key arms of government were corporatised while other state assets were sold, trade tariffs were relaxed and a GST came in as company and income taxes were reduced.
New Zealand went from being Britain's South Pacific farm, as it was known, to a free-market-embracing outpost eager to trade its way into wealth.
Many lost out, and farmers bore the brunt, as Mr Lange acknowledged.
"We have probably upset - in the sense of causing concern - more people all at once than any government has ever done," he said.
"In the rural sector they have taken a terrible pounding and they are continuing to take it. But unless they do there is no future for either farming or this country."
Mr Manhire said the reforms were of a "different seismic category" to those enacted by governments since.
There was also social upheaval too: the decriminalisation of homosexuality, recognition of the once-banned Maori language, and empowering the Waitangi Tribunal to allow settlements for Maori tribes who were victims of wrongdoing at the hands of successive governments.
New Zealand also forged its independent foreign policy during this decade.
A row with the United States led Wellington to part ways from ANZUS, its security alliance with Australia and the US.
That brinkmanship - which has echoes today in New Zealand's handwringing over AUKUS collaboration - is all captured by Juggernaut.
"The ghosts of this Labour government, its shadows, are with almost every party in politics," Mr Manhire said.
"They're a constant. They're lurking everywhere in the range of reforms that were introduced over that period, and the characters that furnished them."
After re-election in 1987, Mr Lange and Sir Roger would both lose their roles before Labour left office in 1990.
Sir Roger would help form the right-wing ACT party, which has helped form the current-day right-wing coalition government, while Mr Lange, after marrying his speechwriter, lamented the cost of his government's "necessary" reforms.
"I want to thank those people who were wrecked by us. Because ... we did them," he said in his 1996 valedictory.
Juggernaut includes dozens of original interviews as well as snippets from bygone interviews and speeches.
Mr Manhire said he became "a weird zombified creature, staying up late at night with my earphones on listening to 1980s radio coverage to find those nuggets to tell the story".
The six-part series, hosted by The Spinoff Podcast Network and funded by NZ On Air, is out now.
Australian Associated Press
