He gets through to the media (‘I was driving into Tauranga when I first heard about the abuse of Nia Glassie, so I immediately rang ZB and Radio Live and put out our comments’); he ‘drives public awareness’. McVicar recently returned from Arizona with a vision. He travelled there to inspect the state’s famous tent prisons – inmates sleeping in tents, working on chain-gangs, denied coffee, salt, cigarettes and mustard.
It pained him to compare these tents with the luxury accommodation provided by New Zealand prisons. ‘I just can’t understand why we haven’t got more people lining up to get in. Why wouldn’t you? If you want your tattoos removed, go to prison. You want your teeth done, go to prison.’ Tent prisons were basic. Even better, they were cheap. He said: ‘It’s what New Zealand needs. You’ve got to look at the cost. To build a prison to hold 650 inmates is about $52 million. You could probably build a tent prison for $250,000.’
Where would you chuck it? ‘Middle of the Desert Road where it’s a long way to walk if you want to escape.’
And put inmates to hard labour? ‘Hard work,’ he said. ‘I’ve worked hard. I had calluses on my hands before I started the trust. That’s what makes you an honest, contributing member of your society. This free-lunch stuff we’ve got here with our welfare system is just going to create more criminals.’
I reminded him of his risible press release headlined, ‘The welfare state killed the Kahui twins’. Did he still hold with that sentiment? McVicar said, ‘Absolutely. And it’s killed many others.’
This line of thinking led to: ‘Any dysfunctional parent, who’s either abused their child or raised a dysfunctional child who’s ended up in the court system, should have any further children removed. There’s no point in allowing her to have children in her care. I mean, you’ve got some women who have just basically become factories for producing children. Three, four, five, six children to different fathers. That burden on society is huge, and I don’t believe should be allowed to continue.’
But this wasn’t about being tough on crime. This was social engineering. And yet McVicar’s version of events is that New Zealand – ‘The country I love; I’m a patriot’ – has gone to the dogs because of social engineers. ‘It’s become too liberal. Someone has to draw a line in the sand. That’s our job.’ What line, what sand? He said, ‘We’ve sent a lot of people overseas to fight for freedom. I see the enemy now as within. The violent underbelly in New Zealand could destroy this country. That is alarming to me.’
He spreads that alarm, frightening the old with explicit true stories of rape and murder, although it’s true that the Sensible Sentencing Trust also offers what might be called palliative care. Their offices feature a private room for grieving families. It was simply furnished; it reminded you of a chapel, or a hospice. McVicar said, ‘The spin-off of our work is watching the revival of victims’ lives when they realise there’s someone out there who goes into bat for them and cares for them.’
Mostly, though, the trust’s function is to apply political pressure. McVicar demands strong leadership in the courts and in parliament. I asked him what he thought about National Party leader John Key. McVicar said, ‘Yeah, I, I, I mean I don’t want this to sort of turn into throwing my weight behind any political party, but I believe John Key has got a lot better vision for New Zealand than Helen Clark … She’s destroying the country I love, as far as family values go, the values I hold dear.’
What are family values? ‘The kitchen table,’ he said. ‘Mum and Dad never had money, but we always had three feeds a day and we always ate at the kitchen table. You didn’t slouch at the table. There were rules, boundaries …’ And there was something else, something that had a familiar ring to it. McVicar did correspondence school. ‘We’d be out in the paddock wherever Mum and Dad were working.’ In a paddock? ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘We did our schoolwork in a tent.’
He liked Elvis, and you can blame his four daughters for his picking up on this strange musical choice: ‘Twisted Sister have come up with some pretty good songs.’ He wanted to outlaw hard-core rap, Marilyn Manson, that sort of thing: ‘We need a vision of where we want the country to be. And that doesn’t work in with my vision.’ And then he said, ‘Someone said to me at a meeting I was speaking at the other day that maybe we need another … what’s her name … the lady who used be a morals campaigner in the 1970s?’ Patricia Bartlett? ‘Patricia Bartlett. Well, maybe she was before her time. Maybe she was a visionary who picked where we were going.’
I asked his views on civil unions. ‘Totally opposed,’ he said. That was predictable. But then he said, ‘I’ve got a gay brother. And that’s fine. He’s totally opposed to civil union, too. He says you don’t need it. He doesn’t see the whole gay thing as being normal. It’s not part of the normal thing. I mean, man and woman are normal. I accept Alan for what he is, and love him no less for the fact he’s gay. But I think allowing people of his … leanings to go out and talk about that sort of thing in schools is wrong.’
He doesn’t think his brother is normal? ‘No.’ And his brother thinks that, too? ‘He’ll say he’s not normal. He’s gay.’
I didn’t know what the hell to make of that. I asked him if his brother was happy. He said, ‘He’s as happy as he can be. His partner’s a really nice guy. I work side by side with both of them. Fantastic workers. But outside of that …’
What about the company McVicar keeps? His representatives on the trust include former ACT MP Stephen Franks, former United First MP Marc Alexander (an advocate of chemical castration for paedophiles – ‘The side effects are minimal’), and Kelly Te Heuheu, whose semi-literate ravings include her support for John Howard’s policies in Aborigine settlements (‘Hone Harawira is not the kind of role model our young need to have in parliament.’)
There was all that kind of nonsense in his life, but he was a four-square, chummy sort of rooster (‘I’m just an average Kiwi’), and there was nothing especially radical in his long-held belief that if anyone had ever harmed his daughters, he would have killed them. Did he mean that? ‘I don’t make hollow threats. I wouldn’t have had an option.’
I said to him if anyone harmed my daughter, I would want that person burnt at a stake and his head chopped off and put on a stick. But that wouldn’t achieve anything, would it? He said, ‘I don’t really agree with that. I was speaking in Gisborne the other day, and a Maori guy took me out afterwards and showed me a couple of places where Maori warriors had raped a young woman and they did put their heads on a stick. Utu.’ And what had that achieved? ‘What that achieved is they didn’t re-offend. End of story.’
But he didn’t believe in the death penalty. ‘No. I don’t think it should be reintroduced. But if we don’t have the faith restored in our justice system, the call for the death penalty will build.’ Later, when I asked him whether trust members thought he had gone too far with his advocacy of tent prisons, he said, ‘There’s people saying I haven’t gone far enough. That’d probably the biggest criticism I’m facing. I won’t go near the death penalty, and a lot of our members are saying I should.’
He wanted a life sentence to mean exactly that – life, no parole, end of story. Rehabilitation? ‘There are some offenders who … what are we keeping them alive for?’ This reminded me of his remark, when he formed the trust in 2001, that when you see a mad dog you shoot it. Had he ever actually shot a mad dog? He told a story.
He said, ‘You bring a dog up from a pup. You try to teach it right from wrong. You try to teach it what its job is, which is to muster. Occasionally there’s a bend in their head that you can’t correct. You can’t rehabilitate that dog. And one day it’ll go out and kill a sheep. I used to try and rehabilitate that dog, and say, Oh, it’s got some good characteristics, I’ll focus on those. But I found you can’t. You can’t rehabilitate it. So you may as well shoot it. And that’s what I do now. If I get a dog that kills, if it gets a taste of blood, I shoot it.’
Where do you shoot a mad dog? In the head? Its body? �
�Body, definitely. You’ve got to be humane. It’s not the dog’s fault. But if you let that dog continue, the rest of your dogs will start doing that. I’m linking all of this back to humans. There are some people we can’t rehabilitate. And we need to accept that.’
But we can’t shoot them. ‘Sadly,’ he said, ‘no.’
[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. As far as reaching any accord with Howard or Bush on meeting targets for carbon emissions, it was reasonable to assume from the lack of enthusiasm in her remark that there would be little or no progress.
And then back home, back to the grind of domestic policy, of management, in the face of a tired New Zealand electorate. ‘Is it? I’m not tired, put it that way,’ she said. ‘Look, the longer you’re in government, inevitably people make mistakes. And some people accumulate the mistakes … It’s pretty obvious there’ll be a reshuffle, and there’ll be some new faces, and we have to keep generating fresh policy.’
Would anyone care? With the Rugby World Cup looming, I asked her what she thought of the old saw that a government always loses its next election when the All Blacks suffer. She said, ‘I don’t think that has any relationship at all. I think New Zealanders keep a correct distance from that sort of thing.’
Clark planned to attend the World Cup quarter-final. She has great admiration for All Black captain Richie McCaw: ‘Extremely level-headed.’ When I asked her if there were any All Blacks who excited the blood, she replied, ‘I wouldn’t use that phrase for myself. I don’t find people excite the blood.’
She recently went skiing for a couple of days. She goes to the gym, eats properly and makes sure she drinks enough water: ‘I have an approach to life that says every day you wake up fit and healthy is a bonus.’ Would she be more pleased if novelist Lloyd Jones won the Booker Prize than if the All Blacks won the World Cup? ‘Equally pleased.’ She remains close to her parents, now aged eighty-three and eighty-five: ‘It’s nice to have people in your life who give you unconditional love and support. I’ve been very lucky to have that from my parents and my sisters.’ She added: ‘And my husband.’
Over the years I have traipsed after Clark on official visits to Nigeria, Fiji and Crete. I’ve always liked her intelligence, found her forthright and amusing, and thanked God I don’t work for her. ‘There was a programme called Facelift, which I’ve never seen,’ she said. ‘I asked someone, “What on earth are they saying about me?” They said, “You and Annette King always seem to be telling somebody off.” I think that’s probably quite accurate.’
Such a singular person, who always occupies her own space, not exactly adrift, her social awkwardness overruled by her self-belief. The easiest way to unwind her in an interview is to lead her towards a remorseless insult.
Q: Have you identified weak performers in the National Party? A: ‘Just about the whole front bench.’
Q: Do you ever miss Don Brash? A: ‘Who?’
Fun and cruel games. But the short, sharp put-down isn’t always intended as an amusement. Last week, I interviewed Garth McVicar of the Sensible Sentencing Trust, who wants New Zealand to house criminals in tent prisons. Clark’s response: ‘Ludicrous.’ I asked her if there were any ideas she had taken from the trust. She said: ‘Nothing.’
When I raised the trust again, she said, ‘We don’t look for simplistic solutions to that issue.’ She meant the issue of violent crime and child abuse. And yet her emphatic rejection of the trust (‘Nothing’) had such a shocking arrogance about it; I put it to her that the trust was providing a voice for victims, who were being ignored by her government. She didn’t agree, and droned for a short time about recognising a ‘burning sense of injustice’.
But I wondered whether there was something wider in all this – a sense, real or imagined, that Clark’s government was alienating great swathes of New Zealanders, who took the view that New Zealand was burning while Labour and its inoffensive little policies fiddled. In short, the whole resentment against that dread phrase: political correctness. ‘That’s always been there, and always will.’ She allowed herself a mirthless laugh and said, ‘It’s the rich fabric of society.’ She added, ‘It’s the same people who would have attacked anti-smoking legislation or any number of things.’
I’ve never exactly been a fan of anti-smoking legislation, but ‘any number of things’ now includes rather more serious issues, particularly child abuse. Would she call that a crisis? ‘No … But it’s too high. There are issues our country’s got to deal with. What haunts me is seeing us right down there at the bottom of the OECD league in violence against children and in the family. That’s appalling and we have to do something.’
Well, yes. Peter Dunne from United First has said that what the government has achieved is ‘hand-wringing and navel-gazing’. Clark went on about The Taskforce for Action on Violence within Families (‘A lot has happened under that’), and a new television advertising campaign. More fiddling? Clark’s view of social breakdown in New Zealand: ‘I don’t see a breakdown. New Zealand stands out as a complex multicultural nation that is relatively at peace with itself.’
Opponents will continue to use child abuse and violent crime as sticks to beat the government. In election year, Clark predicted, it would get personal. Did she see another dirty campaign?
‘I suspect it will become very personalised. I don’t expect the Exclusive Brethren have gone away. It’s just that people will be more alert to the tactics.
‘One of the features of the last campaign was the National Party really thought they had it bought. They spent so much money, they had others spending so much money on their behalf, overtly and covertly, and they actually couldn’t accept that they’d lost. And so what we’ve dealt with ever since in parliament is a National Party that thinks it has a right to be sitting where we are. Well, it didn’t earn that right. But that’s made for particularly bitter politics … Yes, I absolutely expect it to be a bitter and unpleasant campaign.’
It might even excite the blood. Clark attends a great many art openings and plays, that sort of carry-on; I asked her if art actually moved her. ‘Of course.’ Genuinely moved? ‘Of course.’ I doubted it. She mentioned going to see Sir Ian McKellen in King Lear. ‘Fantastic. It’s a morality tale – the foolish old king …’
[September 9]
15
John Key
The Man Who Wasn’t There
Each of the eighteen rooms in The County – a terribly romantic hotel, the flashest in Napier, five-star, built as the county council chambers in 1908, which means it’s not, blessedly, another example of Hawke’s Bay Art Deco – are named after native birds. John Key stayed there on Thursday night. He was in the room next to mine. I got a boring species of duck; Key’s room was the huia, once a quite amazing and very successful bird, but now extinct.
Roosters I Have Known Page 8
