Roosters I Have Known by Steve Braunias

Author:Steve Braunias [Steve Braunias]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781577551253
Publisher: Awa Press
Published: 2012-06-01T04:00:00+00:00

[September 2]

14

Helen Clark

To Excite the Blood

No one dresses like a female television newsreader, and it’s also a fact of modern life that no one in their right mind dresses like prime minister Helen Clark. There she was on Thursday afternoon, marching towards her Auckland electorate office in a cottage next door to a pizza parlour, and she was decked out in pressed black pants and a bright purple jacket as stiff and heavy as a shield. As usual, she was moving fast – ‘Like a southerly in slacks,’ as the television series Eating Media Lunch once described her. She looked entirely theatrical, a strange old veteran hoofer of her own stage, but in 2007 – her eighth year in power, approaching the grand figure of 3000 days – you had to wonder whether the production was The Picture of Dorian Gray.

The first time I interviewed her was in March 2000 – she turned fifty that week, and also marked her first one hundred days as prime minister. She remembered that happy hour. ‘In many ways,’ she said, ‘it seems only like yesterday.’ Strange, then, to observe that she had aged seven years in the past twenty-four hours.

Her same old self? Clark was in tremendous spirits during that ancient interview – as you would expect. Her mission had come to pass, she had finally got the mandate to proceed. She said now, ‘I particularly remember the day we were sworn in as ministers. The first executive thing we did was we had the board of Timberlands, the somewhat errant SOE, summoned to the office of the minister of finance and the minister of state-owned enterprises, and issued with a direction to cease milling native forests.’

The summons to the tower. Those were the good old days of getting rid of undesirables such as Kit Richards at Timber lands, Rosemary Meo at TVNZ, and police commissioner Peter Doone – forgotten names, dust now gathering on their mounted heads. Yes, she said, of course political life was more direct back then: ‘When you first go into government, you have to swing the wheel right around, so things are very direct, very decisive. But then you have to create.’

A year out from the next election, and with National giving Labour a sound thrashing in the polls, these are the kinds of words you can easily imagine passing the smiling lips of John Key. He’s the new force, the prime minister in waiting, all that. The same perception has Clark presiding over a tattered government in its final months.

The talk from the prime minister in her Mt Eden office – a portrait of Michael Joseph Savage on the wall, exhibits of tapa cloth and other bits and Pacific pieces, a tube of Smokers Toothpaste in the hand basin – was confident, assured, professional. She was about to head off to her eighth APEC conference to talk climate change and trade with John Howard, George Bush and other leaders. ‘I have a reasonable idea of how things will progress,’ she said.

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