Political Diaries: 4000 secret interviews recorded with politicians since 1980s – but you still can’t listen to any of them

In the late 1980s, Prime Minister David Lange would confide the ins and outs of his political and personal life in conversations with an oral historian.

The recordings of those conversations touch on a period
in which Lange lost the leadership of his Government and his party, saw them both collapse, and his affair with speechwriter Margaret Pope outed in the press. They’re a rare, hindsight-free, ninth-floor account of the most significant period in recent political history.

Or at least that’s what I think what they are.

Lange’s taped conversations, now more than three decades old, are among the first in a project known as Political Diaries, run by the Alexander Turnbull Library. The recordings are just a fraction of the roughly 4000 interviews in the project, ranging between 15 minutes and an hour and a half in length, conducted with nearly 100 political leaders since 1987.

The project began under the auspices of the independent New Zealand Oral History Archive.

When that came to an end, the project took a brief hiatus until the Alexander Turnbull Library took up the mantle in the early 2000s, assuming both the collection of existing recordings and the responsibility for collecting new ones.

The interviews are archived by the library, to become the fodder of historians, journalists and tragics.

But not yet.

The reason why we can only assume what Lange spoke of during his interviews is that not a single second of a single recording – not even Lange’s, recorded some three decades ago – is currently available to the public.

Part of the bargain archivists make with their politician subjects is that in return for a frank discussion, not just on politics but on life as a politician, an incredibly long and flexible embargo is placed on the interview, often meaning it cannot be released while the subject and certain members of their family are still alive.

The Alexander Turnbull Library’s chief librarian Chris Szekely said most of the interviews ended up being embargoed until the subject died.

“Typically the arrangement is the interviewee is able to place an embargo on the interview, and an embargo can be anywhere between 10 to 20 years with a right of review – or until death,” Szekely said.

Parts of some interviews had been released, but not to the public. Szekely said these had been released “to family in special circumstances”.

“I guess the thing to remember is that it’s been created as a resource for research purposes, rather than a news of the day-type approach.

“The expectation is that political heat has gone in terms of the interviewees and what they’re talking about and the sort of opinions they might be expressing, but it nevertheless is expected to form quite a fascinating insight into what it meant to be a political leader over five decades.

“If we look at the 1980s and what happened at that time through to the social media days of today and the immediacy of news, it’s quite a different world and I would expect that you’d be able to get a sense of that in the way that people speak and what they speak about and level of candour,” he said.

Whenever his recordings are released, Lange will speak from an increasingly alien political landscape, a time when TikTok was a noise a clock made, when China’s economy was smaller than Italy’s, when the Act Party, or what was to become the Act Party, sat next to him in a Labour Cabinet, when Parliament had just 14 women MPs, and had only recently abandoned all-night, gin-soaked legislative sessions in favour of a streamlined sitting calendar.

That candour could potentially get people into trouble and could be the reason why none of the interviews have made it into the public domain.

Szekely said archivists make a “call” around “who else they’re talking about” when it comes to deciding when the recordings should be released.

“The idea is not to cause harm or embarrassment or awkwardness,” Szekely said.

“David [Lange] may have died, but those other individuals are very much active – those things are taken into consideration,” he said.

As a political journalist, someone who spends the bulk of their professional life – most of their waking life – trying to wrest lurid gossip from politicians, the idea that these same MPs voluntarily spill their guts onto the public record is equally tantalising and enervating.

The project feels like anti-journalism. Not because it is not journalistic, but because it can can only really exist because we know politicians often aren’t telling people like me what they’re really thinking when they’re thinking it.

Political interviewing can feel to both its participants and consumers like a play; interviewer and interviewee regurgitating the same rehearsed airless lines, at the same time (shortly before 2pm) and place (Parliament’s black and white tiles) every week.

But that’s also what makes it exciting and keeps us tuning in; the belief, often wrong, that one day you’ll be there when the answer changes – Romeo spots Juliet waking up – and some backbench MP summons the courage to admit they really don’t have that much confidence in their poorly-polling leader.

Political Diaries offers the prospect of a parallel history. Where leaders do ponder chucking it in, where they openly opine about disloyalty in the ranks. It could be an internal monologue or an audio commentary shedding light on an increasingly sanitised, commsified public record.

One former participant in the project, former New Zealand First deputy leader and Cabinet minister in the Labour-NZ First 2017-2020 coalition, Tracey Martin said – only partly in jest – she was so “honest” in her diary entries that they’re probably defamatory.

“Some of it is so honest that – I have concerns,” Martin said, breaking off mid-sentence to explain she thought people would need to die to absolve her of the defamation risk hanging over the recordings.

“I can change the date that it’s going to be released because I think I do need for a couple of people to die before it gets released, just to save myself from defamation or something,” Martin said.

Szekely said Political Diaries participants were mostly, but not exclusively, party leaders.

In the case of New Zealand First, leader Winston Peters told me he was not a part of the project.

The role of New Zealand First representative fell to Martin, who was contacted by the project shortly after becoming deputy leader of the party in 2013.

Charlotte, an oral historian from the South Island, would call Martin once a month and Martin would divulge the ins and outs of political life. Charlotte’s name has been changed after she was contacted for comment and told me that revealing her identity would compromise her work on other oral history projects.

During election campaigns, the frequency of interviews increased to once a week – always conducted by Charlotte.

Martin said she treated the project as “a record of history of what it was like for me, and my role during that period of time, and so it was very personal. It was my reflections on what was happening, what had happened”.

Martin’s time as a minister included acting as the mediator between the then Health Minister, Andrew Little, and the New Zealand First Caucus as the Government was preparing legislation for abortion law reform. Martin successfully negotiated a compromise she thought the Government and New Zealand First could agree on, only for their Caucus to decide they wouldn’t back the legislation unless the bill included the requirement to hold a referendum on the changes – which it did not.

Martin said, “oh yeah”, when asked whether this was a topic on which she spoke frankly to her interviewer.

“That wasn’t a sense of betrayal – that was a sense of frustration,” Martin said. She eventually voted in favour of the legislation, along with fellow New Zealand First MP Jenny Marcroft. The rest of Martin’s caucus voted against the bill.

The real intrigue dates back to a time before Martin was in Government, when she lost a challenge for the party’s deputy leadership to Ron Mark in 2015.

“The deputy leadership felt more like a stab in the back, you know,” she said.

Martin also gave a Cabinet-eye-view account of the breakdown of the New Zealand First-Labour relationship at the end of 2020, when leaders Jacinda Ardern and Winston Peters could barely speak to each other, governing via their chiefs of staff.

“Towards the end of the Coalition Government… it was more about relationships in my own caucus and some of the challenges I was having for my own value structure inside what was… the political party I was in,” Martin said.

New Zealand First’s failure at the 2020 election saw Martin leave Parliament. She later left the party too.

“I told Charlotte – and what’s recorded is how I was feeling in that moment about those issues.

“I was uncensored, and I didn’t care what somebody else’s view of it was, I was merely recording my view,” she said.

Former Prime Minister Sir John Key participated for the duration of his time in office and remembers having more frequent conversations than Martin.

“You try to do it every week – I used to speak every week,” he said.

Key tried to squeeze in conversations around his busy political life, often calling the oral historian assigned to him from the back of Crown limousines, usually speaking for about half an hour.

“Some weeks you’re away or some weeks it just gets lost because there’s so much going on, you have a bit of a catch-up. So it’s not a perfect science,” he said.

Key doesn’t think there are any landmines waiting to go off in his interviews. There’s nothing buried in the archive that will contradict what’s already public.

“There’s no bombshells in there. When I said, ‘I didn’t know Kim Dotcom’ – I didn’t know Kim Dotcom,” he said.

“I remember on numerous occasions saying to the researcher, ‘I don’t know how this guy thinks he knows me, but I don’t know [him]”.

“There’s no gotcha in there.

“It wasn’t a bitch session about my fellow ministers or anything.”

Both Key and Martin found the experience cathartic. The reason I got in touch with Martin for this story was that I remembered Martin telling me when she was in Government how much she valued being able to talk through her political life with a historian. Key enjoyed recording his side of issues, particularly when he found himself on the losing side of a particular news cycle.

“I remember at times beyond a variety of different issues just being pretty candid about what I really thought had happened,” Key said.

“So maybe there’s a back story there of ‘why’ and that’s the sort of thing they would ask and I might have a deeper knowledge of a particular ministerial issue and, you know, I may or may not have shared it – there are probably one or two things I didn’t share. because they were just very delicate.

“You obviously wouldn’t share issues of national significance because the researcher wouldn’t have had a security clearance.”

Some things were off limits for Martin too, who said she never broke Cabinet collective responsibility in the interviews, despite how frank they could get.

Green Party co-leader James Shaw agreed the conversations were in a way cathartic. He said it was a rare chance to talk with someone, knowing for sure his remarks would not find their way into the media.

“In this place, it’s very difficult to talk to someone knowing that they’re not going to repeat what you’ve said for 30 years,” Shaw said.

He said the first few interviews he did for the project were “guarded”, before he “got comfortable” with the process.

“The earlier recordings will be more massaged, I just remember the thought occurring to me, ‘Do I really want to say this about this person and have that anywhere’,” he said.

MPs I spoke to all felt a kind of duty to history, which drove their participation.

“Long after we have left office and maybe left the planet, people can get a better understanding of all the perspectives we had on different issues at time,” Key said.

Act leader David Seymour hypothesised the tapes could be fed into some kind of AI (artificial intelligence) tool for analysis by future historians.

“I don’t think that anything I’m doing is particularly important but I suspect that in 50 or 100 years’ time, there will be a lot more information available,” Seymour said.

“People will be using AI and better analysis to analyse what people were thinking and saying, and humans’ understanding of what was going on in the world will be much more sophisticated than it is now.”

Seymour said he tried to be “as honest and open with them and candid as possible”, but said he was “honest”, and there wasn’t anything he said privately that he wouldn’t feel bad about coming out in public.

“If somebody hacked the Alexander Turnbull Library and leaked it all tomorrow, I wouldn’t be particularly worried,” he said.

For Shaw, it was the importance of creating a historical record that caused him to grow more comfortable with the project.

“If we’re going to be treating it with the respect it deserves as history, and giving people the opportunity in the future to kind of analyse and draw any lessons out of it, then I think we owe it to be open about it, frankly,” he said.

Shaw said he would use the recordings himself, “when I get around to processing this experience” – perhaps by writing a book.

“I entertain the idea,” he said.

Shaw thinks the immediacy of some events, the sense of what it was like during particular moments (the mind wanders to 2017 coalition talks or the Covid-19 pandemic) could only be recalled by listening back to the original tape.

“I know that there are conversations that I’ve had as part of the history project, which – which I think I’ll only really be able to anchor myself back in the experience by listening to the tape,” he said.

Participation in the project usually ends after the leaders leave office.

While many in active political life pine for the day when they may be left alone, still many more, when that day comes, struggle with the fact they are no longer of interest.

New Zealand is a small nation. The bandwidth of public life, jammed with actors, singers, influencers, has little room for politicians – let alone ex- ones.

The diaries project eventually cuts its subjects loose too, but politicians I’ve spoken to say they’d catch up with their diarist.

Key said his participation in the project ended about a year after he left Parliament, with a long exit interview.

Martin was the same.

After finishing her final interview for the project, wrapping up reflections on post-Parliament life, she decided to meet Charlotte in real life.

“I was supposed to… actually go and visit her,” Martin said. The meeting never took place; Martin thinks Covid or something else got in the way.

Martin said it’s “quite sad” leaving the project. The oral historians don’t perhaps know the role they’ve played in their subjects’ lives.

“She played quite an important part in my political career from the point of those recordings on, because she never gave her view,” she said.

Martin wheeled back on an earlier question I’d asked about whether the interviews were somewhat cathartic.

“From that perspective – like you talked before about whether it was cathartic or not – two people that became the ones that I could talk to and trust 100 per cent were my husband and Charlotte.

“I absolutely trusted Charlotte that what I said went nowhere,” Martin said.

Nowhere yet.