Opinion - Pattrick Smellie: Bye bye Aunty Helen

By Pattrick Smellie

Tuesday 14th April 2009

I first encountered Helen Clark in 1981. She was my political studies tutor at Auckland University.

She gave me a D for a very poorly written polemic, based on no research, in which I argued that the anti-Springbok Tour movement would drive voters into the National Party's arms as a reaction against the violence and disorder they were seeing.

I gave no references and possibly sounded as if I supported the tour, when in fact I was solid as against it, man. The shame of watching my friends storming the field before the Hamilton test on the TV in a bar in Ponsonby is with me today.

Next time I saw her would have been around 1984, when I moved to Wellington to work on The Dominion. She was chairing the foreign and affairs select committee, shepherding the anti-nuclear law for David Lange.

David Lange: now there's a name I didn't hear in her valedictory speech in Parliament last Thursday, although there was one comment which might have applied as much to David Lange as it could yet to John Key.

"In my experience," said long-haul player Clark, "success is seldom instant in politics, and where it does come quickly, it can equally quickly fizzle out."

Clark survived a patch where her preferred PM rating was barely 2%. I remember Lange, by then a bored backbencher, gleefully gossiping to me that a delegation had gone to ask Clark to step down.

It was one of my best scoops. Lange told me Koro Wetere was so nervous he cut grooves with his fingernails into the table they sat around.

Leading that delegation was Michael Cullen, who also quietly bowed out this week. Cullen was the fiscally responsible rock to Clark's socially reforming instinct. Labour left the books in good shape, but they spent it all for us, mainly on health and education, which continue apparently to under-perform, and show just how thankless a politician's efforts can be.

The tax cuts, delivered like a ticking time bomb by Cullen into the sudden fiscal nightmare that Bill English finds today, were a very long time coming.

In a supreme irony, Cullen leaves just as his sworn enemy in the 1987-90 Cabinet, Roger Douglas, nestles back into parliamentary life in his dotage for Act.

Douglas was another not mentioned in Clark's swansong.

Speaking of the Labour Party renaissance in Auckland in the 1960's, she picked out Jim Anderton and Jonathan Hunt for special mention, although the Douglas brothers, Roger and Malcolm, were part arguably part of that too. Rogernomics was dissected only as a political disaster for Labour.

Clark entered Parliament in 1981 to find Muldoon in charge and generally elderly male MP's playing billiards on beautiful tables within strides of the Debating Chamber, high stakes card schools in MPs' offices, and a great deal of focus on doings in the Bellamy's bar.

These reminiscences, and their juxtaposition with today's polyglot New Zealand Parliament painted Clark's most intriguing verbal image for a speech otherwise delivered in the same flat-vowelled, lifeless and slightly stumbling way that Clark has always had.

She was a power politician, but never an orator. Face to face, she was warm and often funny. Her embarrassment when I told her about that D was memorable. "Oh, you poor thing," she blurted spontaneously.

Her speech seemed so often to be on the verge of applause, and might have got it from a stronger speaker. In the end, the ovations were three: for her parents, where she spoke movingly; for her refusal to take New Zealand into the war in Iraq; and the perseverance over many years of her husband, Peter Davis. The couple suffered some of the nastiest stuff that New Zealand's small-minded can come up with.

In being a strong, childless woman Prime Minister often surrounded by able women, Clark straddled a divide that New Zealand has yet to cross successfully. For a certain type of New Zealander, her combination of authority and feminist conviction came across as bossy, scary, and above all threatening, for many women as well as men.

Who talks now about "the nanny state"? That tiresome slur died with the Clark Labour government, or "Lyebah" government, as Clark would say it.

The only time her voice seemed to quaver was when she talked about finding out who your real friends are "when the phone stops ringing and the texts go very quiet" after losing the election last year.

What did she gloss? The 1996 negotiations with Winston Peters, for one thing, where after weeks of suspense, Peters finally went with Jim Bolger's National Party.

If she'd kowtowed more to Peters, Clark might have governed from 1996. When she finally corraled Peters as Foreign Affairs Minister in her last government, she showed her class. Neutered on his signature trade and immigration issues by his international duties, Peters the show pony was finally out to pasture.

On governing during the long run of economic growth, Clark worked in her government's "economic transformation" buzz phrase, but she seemed almost to lack conviction. The last nine years were boiled down into a long list of policy actions rather than a period of strength not exploited for greater gain.

Some, like giving midwives the right practice independently and the anti-smoking campaign, were controversial and close to Clark's own heart. But there was no sum articulated that was greater than the parts.

Clark led very competently, but the closest she came to doing the vision thing was her sponsorship of the arts, culture and heritage,which has fostered the flowering of a more mature nationhood in recent years, and which hasn't come a moment too soon.

It's in this maturing, more complex society that Labour now seeks rebirth and a new constituency. But be watchful.With Aunty Helen and Uncle Michael out of the way now, Cousin Goff had better start watching his back.

Comments from our readers

No comments yet