Roosters I Have Known

by Steve Braunias

  I wondered whether the same was true of its occupant. As I listened to him and looked at him during our interview in the hotel’s plush ye olde library, it wasn’t as simple as thinking that the lights were on but no one was home. It was more the case that he was in there, somewhere, but there were no lights on. Key, the forty-six-year-old married to Bronagh and father of Stephanie and Max; Key, the former foreign exchange dealer who made a vast fortune and retired at forty; Key, the nowhere man. Prime minister Helen Clark’s scornful assessment of the National Party leader – ‘insubstantial’ – might even count as high praise. At least it acknowledged his presence.

  I thought, Where has he been all his life? He was like a missing person. When I asked him what I would find if I cut him open, he said, ‘You’d find a pretty decent person. Someone that’s balanced. I’m actually an extremely decisive person at making decisions.’ I was tempted to ask: Are you sure? Instead, I asked him if he thought he was an interesting person. ‘Oh, I reckon,’ he said. ‘I’m reasonably interesting.’ Did he possess an imagination? ‘Sure do! You have to have dreams, and you need an imagination for dreams, and you can actually live those dreams if you have enough determination.’

  It’s true, of course, that he was decent. An eager man with a nice smile and lasered eyes. (‘It used to annoy me when it rained and the water was on my glasses.’) The kind of guy who probably doesn’t have a bad bone in his body. But did he have any bones? If I had cut him open – nothing I wished to perform; I doubt it’s possible for anyone to bear any particular malice towards him yet – what I might have found were the latest exchange rates. ‘I have a photographic memory,’ he said, ‘for numbers.’

  Is this man our next prime minister? The polls say yes. More accurately, they say yes please. Key was in Napier for another of his groovy evenings sponsored by the groovy conservatives who make 42 Below vodka. The young and the aspirant gathered at East Pier in the city’s lively new waterfront to hear him stand in the middle of the dance floor – no tie, no jacket, a hint of middle-age midriff spread – and bang on and on and on about his promise of a brilliant new future. True, as time wore on and on and on, they fiddled with their handbags and pulled at their goatees. But they regarded Key as their saviour.

  They wanted Key to show them the money, and he did. He talked their language: wealth, opportunity, incentives. China, India and Indonesia, he said, would soon boast a population of one billion people, all on high wages; the time for New Zealand to start pocketing some of that loot was now.

  But the notion that this man could be our next prime minister struck me as ludicrous. His ambition was like a challenge, an idea, a game: ‘I’m interested in building things that work.’ I asked the man who might lead the country whether he believed in destiny, and he said, ‘Yeah, a little bit. I’m quite superstitious as a person. It used to be that if I wore ties on days I lost money, I would never wear them again. I’m a bit like that in politics. I recently had a set of cufflinks that didn’t treat me well. I’ve put them to one side.’

  How big was his wine collection? ‘Reasonable.’ What’s reasonable? ‘I don’t know. Seventy-five dozen or something like that.’ Why did he buy paintings by Hotere and Goldie? ‘Good investment.’ Does art excite the blood? ‘Oh, I quite like it.’

  Key was an accountancy student at Canterbury University in the early 1980s; who was he more into back then – The Clash or Billy Joel? ‘Probably more Billy Joel … I like a whole range of music. I like The Corrs and Robbie Williams and Hayley Westenra. I like a lot of stuff that doesn’t require any energy or effort.’

  What, I asked him, does excite the blood? Finally, he said something that was inside of him: ‘Winning the election.’

  We talked about leaders. Did he think Helen Clark would have made a successful foreign exchange dealer? ‘No. I don’t think she’s naturally intuitive, or has gut instincts. I think she studies hard.’ He regarded Bill Clinton as a great leader: ‘He undertook some difficult things around welfare reform, but did it with a heart.’

  Did Key think he was a born leader? ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I think the answer to that is yes. It depends on how you define a leader, but I think leaders are primarily … one, they’re focussed, two, they can actually make decisions, three, they have a sense of purpose, and four, they have a degree of discipline. History would indicate I’ve led in lots of different things I’ve done.’

  He very often spoke in such long, convoluted sentences. Asked whether he would privatise health and education, he banged on and on and on about personal freedoms, and finally answered – or dodged – the question when he said, ‘We do like the idea of engaging the private sector in things like the running of a prison.’ A new biography of George Bush quotes the US president saying that if you want a friend in Washington, get a dog; was it like that in Wellington? The full reply: ‘I have great people around me, in parliament but also my support staff, who are a world-class team, right up there with anything I’ve seen in the commercial world, but in the end leaders make decisions, and what that means is you have to live with those decisions, and on that basis if you want a friend, get a dog, is probably right.’

  In short, the answer was yes; and to cut to the chase, this was his position on the US invasion of Iraq: ‘I don’t think it was illegal. At the time … it was a genuine use of force.’

  At least he hadn’t reached for his favourite term and said, ‘It depends on how you define invasion.’ When was he last rat-arsed drunk? ‘It depends on how you define that,’ he said, but the answer was four years ago, on vodka. He met Bronagh when they were teenagers; had he fallen in love before? ‘It depends on how you define being madly in love,’ he said, but the answer was no, although he’d been dumped twice by girls at school. ‘They didn’t see any future in me.’

  Key was totally immersed in bright thoughts of the future. I dragged him back to the past. His father, George Key, was an alcoholic who died when his son was ‘five or six’. In another interview, Key had said he had a ‘shadowy memory’ of his father giving him a toy truck, but remembered nothing else about him.

  I asked about the truck. He said, ‘It was some sort of fire-engine type truck. I remember the particular occasion. I remember the day. It was a Saturday. I remember him going out and buying it for me. From memory there was a bit of a row with Mum afterwards. For some reason, that stayed in my mind.’

  The household was all women – his mother Ruth, his older sisters Sue and Liz. ‘I didn’t overly notice not having a father … I remember vividly having sex education that was part of secondary school, and going with my best mate’s dad. But outside of that it isn’t something that I sat around really thinking a lot about. It was just the way it was. I just got on with it.’

  The family took in boarders. ‘One guy lived with us for quite a long time. He came off a farm in Canterbury. He used to take me home to the farm in the school holidays, and I’d spend a week out there with his family for quite a number of years.’ Was he a father figure? ‘No, but I did things I could never do. Get out a .22 and shoot cans off a fence and go rabbit-shooting and drive a tractor and learn to weld.’ Did he ever have a father figure? ‘No.’

  Who was George Key? ‘I don’t know. He was English. He just wasn’t on the scene.’

  I said he sounded like a non-person. ‘Well, he played a relatively insignificant part in my life. I don’t criticise him for that. It’s just that’s the way it is. It’s not a hostile thing.’ A toy fire engine, a row, a Saturday – was that the sum total he had of his father? ‘That’s about it,’ he said.

  [September 16]

  16

  Dick Hubbard

  Breakfasts and Tombstones

  Poor, stupid, bungling, unlovable Auckland. New Zealand’s biggest city is so careless about its future that it seems quite agreeable to the notion of electing John Banks as mayor. The man who had got thrown out on his arse three years before – after his one loud, belligerent term as mayor, he was defeated by a whopping
20,000 votes – is wearing his knuckles to the bone as he door-knocks up a storm in the lead-up to the October 13 election. He’s visible, he’s fit, he’s showing every sign of enjoying himself. But the standing mayor, Dick Hubbard, is … where, exactly?

  ‘Running the ship,’ he said. I met the quiet campaigner on a dismal spring afternoon at his office on the fifteenth floor of the council chambers. The ship swayed in the wind; rain lashed the windows, the sky was dark. In reception, there were books on Maori proverbs and Nelson Mandela, and a new mayoral robe designed by an AUT student for Air New Zealand Fashion Week – in all seriousness, it was made from merino possum silk yarn.

  It was worn by a dummy. I hoped when His Worship appeared that I would be able to tell the difference. I have always held a soft spot for Hubbard. In my long career, I can lay claim to trying to finish a few people off, but the only time I have been in on the ground floor of anything remotely significant is that I was the first journalist to interview Hubbard. It was before he came to fame as the man who said all those very sincere things about corporate social responsibility, took on the Business Roundtable, and emerged as a business leader who seemed to have a vision, a cause, a moral purpose.

  I interviewed him in 1994 because I liked the little magazine that tipped out of the breakfast cereals he made as chairman of Hubbard Foods. It had puzzles, jokes, thoughts for the day, and very sincere messages about treating people with respect. It was better than reading the morning paper. It revealed an interesting mind. So I bowled out to his factory in Mangere and met a strange, nervous, engaging fellow who wore a white shop-floor jacket that read, ‘HI. I’M DICK’. ‘That was the journey,’ he said on Thursday, ‘that led me to City Hall.’

  He was less fun than the singular rooster I remembered in Mangere. He remained nervous – the stuttering, the hands scratching at his elbows – but it felt like he took up more room, had a heavier presence. He seemed even stranger. A tall man, lanky and long-limbed, he was like some pious Jehovah of the mountains, who had tramped a path into the city to teach it some manners. He pointed to the pair of climbing boots and his pick and his rope that he used to climb Mount Cook in 2000. ‘I’m a mountain man through and through,’ he said. ‘For me, that’s a great spiritual place.’

  It had been out of character for Auckland to elect someone with principles. Now, with Banks ahead in the polls, perhaps poor, stupid etc Auckland is bored with its experiment, and wants Hubbard out.

  He talked about his decision to run for mayor in 2004. He was already thinking about it when he attended a business meeting in the council chamber. ‘Everyone filed out for morning tea. I saw the mayor’s chair, and went and sat on it. Closed my eyes, and imagined a council meeting. I thought: Yeah, I can do this.’

  Well, the past three years have opened his eyes. He said, ‘The sad reality of politics is that most careers end in tears.’

  Would he be sobbing on election day? He gave the wrong answer. ‘If it comes to be that my best shot isn’t good enough, I’ll move on.’ Where would he go? ‘At the moment, I’m concentrating one hundred and ten percent on getting across the line.’ That was the right answer. And then he lurched back to giving the wrong answer. ‘But if it wasn’t to be, there are plenty of areas where I could turn my attention. I am committed to doing public good.’

  What was he playing at? He really oughtn’t to have been talking out loud about losing. I thought: Please, for your own good, shut up. But he wouldn’t. He said, ‘I think most successful people are people who can handle failure. And to me, the sign of a true man is not how he handles success, it’s how he handles failure.’ It was like he was daring himself for a challenge: losing on October 13.

  He was born in Komata, between Thames and Paeroa, and raised on a dairy farm. Started milking cows at five, could drive a tractor at six, lift a hay bale at nine. Good outdoor stuff, but his earliest memory was hapless: ‘Getting kicked by the draught-horse.’

  His father was a returned serviceman; his mother, with her flaming red hair and flaming accent, was a war bride from Edinburgh. ‘The transition must have been very difficult for her,’ he said. Was she isolated? ‘There was obviously a different way of seeing things. She refused to get into some of the scone-baking competitions at the local Country Women’s Institute.’ Why? ‘She felt there was perhaps a bit more to life than seeing who can bake the best scone. She was an avid reader. She had a high IQ.’

  He was the oldest of three. He studied hard, farmed hard. ‘I wasn’t in with the smart set. I hit my straps more at university. Before going, I went to Outward Bound. I got a huge amount out of that. That actually was life-changing.’ He said it gave him confidence. Had that been lacking? ‘Yeah. It wasn’t low, but I certainly wouldn’t consider it high.’ Why was that? He said, ‘Most of my friends’ parents were from Paeroa. My mother was seen by the community as being a bit different.’ Was he closer to her or to his father? ‘Probably Dad. He was rock solid.’

  Somewhere in there were the causes for Hubbard becoming such a singular character, an unlikely leader. He thought a lot about leadership. His verdict on John Banks: ‘A basher and a bruiser. If you read analytical books on personality characteristics, inevitably bullying comes back to someone who’s got low self-esteem, and low self-esteem means you tend not to have moral fibre and moral courage.’

  I asked him about his own psychological profile. He said, ‘Factor-five leadership.’ What? He blathered on about the lessons he gained from reading From Good to Great by Jim Collins. The book argued that a ‘factor-five’ leader was someone, Hubbard said, who ‘works quietly, doesn’t use his personality to impose, works through the issues, not relying on ego, or power, or status.’

  That was Hubbard’s style. It led, he said, to a lot of successes during his term as mayor. What about defeats? I expected him to dodge the question, but he said, ‘Oh, yes. Yeah. Yeah. Well, yes. I’ve missed out on some issues. No question about that. I have no problem with the fact I’ve had some defeats.’

  I reminded him of a quote he once gave: ‘I have my own personal views on sensitive issues such as eternity. I subscribe very strongly to the view that when we depart this mortal coil, it’s the legacy we leave behind to future generations that is our path to immortality.’ Hubbard, the mountain Jehovah. He nodded when I read out his speech, and said, ‘I don’t subscribe to the pink cloud, the angels, an eternity playing golf. I do really believe it’s about the legacy you leave. Immortality is you embedded in future generations.

  ‘I think it’s nice to depart the mortal coil saying you have made a difference to other people’s lives and made the world a better place. I do not want on my tombstone, “Here lies a man who made a lot of money”, or “Here lies a man who made wealthy men even wealthier”. I’d like it to say, “Here lies a man who did make a difference”.’

  It was tempting fate for the mayor to be even talking about tombstones. I said to him that his tombstone might read, ‘Here lies a one-term mayor’. He said, ‘Well, I’d like it to say something more profound than a three-year interval in my life.’

  Okay. What if it were pithier and read, ‘Former mayor’? Once more, he was determined to give the wrong answer. He said, ‘I will be a former mayor at some stage. Whether it’s three, six or nine years. I certainly don’t see myself setting a target of running for twelve or fifteen years. Possibly not even nine years …’

  Amazing. I asked him for his favourite Bible passage. He thought for a while, and remembered what ‘the good bishop’ had said to him when he was confirmed into the Anglican Church in 1962: ‘Hold fast to that which is good.’ He has; will Auckland?

  [September 23]

  17

  Louise Nicholas

  The Half-life of Louise Nicholas

  Louise Nicholas said, ‘November the twenty-sixth, two thousand and three.’ I had asked her when she first met Phil Kitchin, the Dominion Post journalist who turned up at her door and changed her life, as well as the lives of the three police offi
cers she claimed had raped her, and the life of another cop who, Kitchin told Nicholas on November 26, 2003, had betrayed her. The rest really is history – New Zealand history, an infamy, something ugly and bleak and rotten.

  Nicholas and Kitchin have become friends. I interviewed her at Kitchin’s house. He lives in a river valley, bellbirds and tui in the lovely secluded view from his porch. There was yelling from another part of the house. Was someone, I asked, in pain? Kitchin said that was his autistic son singing in the shower.

  It was a dark winter afternoon. Nicholas sat in front of a log fire with a glass of rum and Coke, wolfing her way through a packet of Holiday cigarettes, a small, light, narrow woman, forty years old, tense and suspicious, and although there was something hunted about her, like a child afraid of a harsh word or some worse punishment, she spoke with the kind of determination that has made her a legendary figure.

  In the autumn of 2006, Nicholas appeared at the Auckland High Court to accuse three men – and here goes that old litany of names you’ve heard so often, the deeply unpleasant firm of Clint Rickards, Brad Shipton and Bob Schollum – of raping her, repeatedly, once with appalling violence, in the early 1980s in ruthless Rotorua. Nicholas took the stand. She looked terrible. I wrote back then: ‘She seemed starved; her skin had the tan of someone who works outdoors, but her face was caved in, all bones.’ I wasn’t surprised to hear that she had lived on coffee and cigarettes during the trial.

  The trial she lost: the jury reaching its verdict of not guilty, the judge saying, and how carefully he put these words, ‘The accused are now free to leave the courtroom.’ Rickards left for home; Shipton and Schollum left to return to jail. Nicholas knew it, the press knew it, the judge and the lawyers knew it, and soon everyone else knew it, but it was kept secret from the jury that the pair had already been convicted for their role in the pack rape of a Mount Maunganui woman, who had come forward after Kitchin told Nicholas’s story.