As the AUS exercises got underway in Sydney minus the New Zealanders on the morning of 8 March 1985, an Australian ecowarrior pilot dive-bombed the Buchanan with yellow dye, which missed its target.
David Lange for whatever reason arrived back halfway through the crucial New Zealand Cabinet meeting on 28 January 1985, where he learned that the acting Prime Minister Geoffrey Palmer had during his absence taken a leaf out of his unilateral book and rejected the requested visit of the Buchanan. After Cabinet voted to confirm Palmer’s action, New Zealand was duly banished from ANZUS exercises. Lange expressed surprise that he was the only person in Cabinet not opposed to an American nuclear warship visit to New Zealand.
With legal finesse he soon after appeared at the Oxford Union Debate and delivered probably the most quoted Kiwi phrase since Hillary ‘knocked the bastard off’, namely requesting a Pommie debater back off because he could ‘smell the uranium on your breath’. Lange did not manage to reject his nuclear cake and also not eat it, but he did become the most famous global opponent of the mighty American nuclear fleet.
Lange took up drinking because of politics. Hawke gave up drinking because of politics.
The Palm Sunday anti-nuclear protest soon after this story was the biggest Australia has seen, over 350,000 marching against the nuclear club their prime minister was a willing member of.
The following July the French bombed the Greenpeace protest ship in Auckland harbour, with loss of a protester’s life. The French paid millions in compensation and got their saboteurs out of New Zealand custody. But the French nuclear testing in the Pacific ended soon after, as indeed had the British nuclear testing in Australia. The Australians and New Zealanders had found common cause in objecting to the testing of British and French nuclear weapons in or near Australasia. As this is written the British prime minister wants more nuclear ships at a cost Britain minus the ‘Great’ prefix cannot afford, except at the expense of its underclass. Russia and China and other nuclear nations are gearing up nuclear spending. The guarantee of Mutually Assured Destruction has been ramped up.
Whatever twisted path brought Prime Minister Lange into the global ring as the anti-nuclear champion of the world, his Cabinet’s action has been sustained for over three decades and the Americans have got over our rebellious behaviour and talk to us again. Our Trans-Tasman cousins, or rather their leaders, have never liked our nuclear-free stance. If I had allowed my paranoia free rein, Downing and his Australian spooks would have been party to the Anglo-French dirty tricks against Lange.
I met David Lange once, at a reception. I saw the grumpy and the kindly sides of him. I had just finished a newspaper series on ethnic minorities that became the book The Other New Zealanders. I said I knew he was of German descent but was he from the Moutere settlement near Nelson? He abruptly turned and walked away without answering. A short time later he returned all smiles and said in his hearty fashion he didn’t realise I was a journalist and his family came from up north.