Pen portraits skimpy on insight and detail

Reviewed by JOHN ROUGHAN

PUBLIC LIVES - New Zealand's Premiers and Prime Ministers 1856-2003 by Ian F. Grant

New Zealand Cartoon Archive. $34.95

The three most powerful words in politics, according to Mike Moore, briefly Prime Minister of New Zealand, are: "Why not me?"

And the vicissitudes of a national economy are such that chance might come the way of any wide-eyed candidate who enters Parliament with a modicum of competence and a ton of confidence.

Those who become Prime Minister have the good fortune to be leading their party at the right time. Others with the potential of an Ann Hercus or a Jim McLay find themselves on the wrong side of the tide.

Conversely, when a party's tide is out, the eyes of even a Gerry Brownlee can light up with the idea, "Why not me?"

So who are these 37 - just 37 in 147 years of elected government - whose personal qualities won the confidence of their followers and, for a while, the country?

What qualities did they have in common? What does their success say about us?

Only the first of those questions is tackled in this book.

Ian Grant, founder of the New Zealand Cartoon Archive at the Alexander Turnbull Library, has produced an illustrated collection of pen portraits that will be a ready reference for schools and a Christmas gift for someone with a passing interest in politics.

Each of the 37 characters receives a concise summary of his or her activities in office and a cautious assessment of their contribution.

There is little to tie their stories together, despite an introduction proclaiming, "The issues have changed but the basic prime ministerial qualities remain the same."

Then what are they? His introductory essay fails to give us much more than a resume of their differences.

Dipping into the individual portraits, the reader can take the "lives" in any order fancied. The temptation is to start at the end, though the accounts of those we know are the least rewarding. We observe or recall the personalities more vividly than they are described in this book.

Their treatment in these pages is generally kind.

Helen Clark, for example, has "long since abandoned the heady leftist enthusiasms of her university days; there were still ideals and aspirations, but they were more 'corporatist' in tone, with the state, employers and trade unions working co-operatively to modernise and diversify the New Zealand economy in tandem with measures that would minimise economic and social difficulties."

The woman herself could not say it better - but a writer should.

Of Jenny Shipley, he writes, "The New Zealand public never saw ... the warm, friendly and unaffected woman liked and respected by those who know her personally."

Jim Bolger: "Often breathtaking and quite unrepentant shifts of ground or reversals of policy were to help him manoeuvre successfully through one of the most complicated and challenging decades in New Zealand history."

And David Lange: "The economic reformers who had pushed for Lange's elevation to the leadership were contemptuous of his mid-course change of heart, traditional Labour voters were dismayed that he had been a Rogernomics fellow traveller for so long ... with the passing of time it is also possible to see him as a big man who gave new confidence to a small country."

The "big"Prime Ministers of New Zealand's history - Seddon, Massey, Savage, Fraser, Holyoake, Muldoon - are not the most interesting in this book.

It is more rewarding to dip into the lives some of those lesser known today: Holland, Coates and some of the earliest premiers who were part-time politicians and sometimes just as much painters and poets.

If there is one trend through these 147 years it is to steadily increasing professionalism. Of that trend today's incumbent is surely the apogee.