- Another significant cause of the 1981 Springbok Tour Protests in 1981 was the Government's inability to uphold the conditions of the Gleneagles Agreement. The Gleneagles Agreement accepted that ‘it was the urgent duty of their governments to combat vigorously the evil of apartheid by withholding support for and by discouraging contact or competition with sporting organisations, teams or sportsmen from South Africa or any other country where sports are organised on the basis of race, colour or ethnic origin’.
Despite Gleneagles, Robert Muldoon made it clear that the government would not allow political interference in sport. On September 1980, the NZRFU took this as a sign and invited the South Africans to tour the following year. The deputy prime minister, Brian Talboys wrote to Ces Blazey, the NZRFU chairman, expressing concern that a tour was even being considered. He was concerned that such contact would be seen as overlooking apartheid and would affect ‘how New Zealand is judged in the international arena’.
Robert Muldoon said that he could see ‘nothing but trouble coming from this’, but when he was confronted with the choice of cancelling the tour, he spoke of ‘our kith and kin’ in South Africa and the fact that New Zealanders and South Africans had
served side by side in the Second World War. He repeated his word that New Zealand was a free and democratic country and that ‘politics should stay out of sport’.