By GREG DIXON
A bag of fat, red plums is hanging on the handle of Judith Tizard's front door.
There's no note attached, but as the MP for Auckland Central sweeps open the door of her Ponsonby home she knows exactly who's the generous soul.
"She's a nice old dear," Tizard enthuses as she unhitches the gift from her 93-year-old next-door neighbour.
"She left them on the door because she doesn't want to disturb me."
It's a sweet - and, as it turns out, tasty - gesture.
It's a tiny nod too, to another time, to the sort of community where Tizard grew up in the 1950s and 60s.
But that bag of fruit is also a reminder of what she and other politicians mostly leave behind when they go to Wellington.
"I miss the normal daily contact you have with friends and neighbours and family when you live at home every day," Tizard says as she sips tea in her small back garden after a week down at Beehive.
"There is a big price to pay [for going into parliament]. I was thinking that every summer you spend time with the family and there are all sorts of things you haven't heard. It's really hard to stay in touch with friends and it's really hard to have any sort of social life.
"I'm single, I live on my own. It's pretty bloody lonely a lot of the time. I was sitting there at 2.30 this morning in my office in the Beehive sorting vast piles of paper and thinking, 'What the hell am I doing here? It's supposed to be summer holidays. Haven't you got anything better to do?'"
Tizard is not completely alone. She has her two skittish cats, Max and Mini. But being a Pollie does play havoc with the household. She moved from Mt Wellington to her slightly scruffy Ponsonby home - her "midden," she calls it - in the middle of the election campaign and hasn't completely unpacked.
She is trying to do a box a day, but she still hasn't got curtains up, she hasn't found the time to get the broken vacuum cleaner fixed, and her clothes-dryer is still waiting to be put up on a wall.
You just can't help asking whether a seat in the Beehive is worth the price of entry for the 44-year-old?
"It's a fascinating job," she says rather predictably, "and you can't always have everything.
"I do it because it has to be done and because it was an absolutely gradual process, almost by osmosis."
Or by birth. Tizard, of course, belongs to one of the country's few political dynasties.
Her father, the Hon Bob Tizard, was a 38-year veteran of politics, the MP for Otahuhu for 21 years and Panmure for six, and served as a minister. In the third and fourth Labour governments he was Deputy Prime Minister.
Her mother, Dame Catherine Tizard, an Auckland City councillor and the mayor for seven years, became the country's first woman Governor-General.
So it comes as little surprise then when their daughter - Judith Tizard has two older sisters, Anne and Linda, and a younger brother, Nigel - says she always politicised.
"I think it was just a choice about whether you acted or not. I remember arguing with my father that I should be able to go canvassing in the 1966 election when I was 10.
"He said, 'Oh no, I think you should wait for the next one.' But I said, 'Linda canvassed in the last one and she is only two years older than I, so she must have been nine last election.'
"He said, 'Oh alright, if you can work that out you can go canvassing.'
"It was always deeply political. My grandparents, particularly my mother's parents, were very involved and very interested in politics.
"It was my grandfather Mclean who said what I needed to know about politics was that if I ever voted anything but Labour my hands would be struck off by lightening as I left the polling booth."
It was a stable childhood, however. Raised on the hill between Glen Innes and Glen Dowie - "Bob and his brother build a house in famous New Zealand tradition" - young Judith attended the local primary, intermediate and high schools until her father became a cabinet minister in the Norman Kirk government.
Kirk decided that he want cabinet families together and "ordained" that they moved to Wellington. With only she and her brother Nigel still at home, they went.
"My mother was heard to comment later that she thought her marriage had probably lasted 29 years because Bob was away all week.
"In many ways the move was great fun, but in many ways it was a disaster for us."
Tizard recalls that she developed a half-and-half life in Wellington, working part time while beginning a law and commerce degree at Victoria, as well as being the daughter of Bob Tizard, MP, which could be "pretty intense."
There were huge kindnesses during those years, she says. There was also nastiness - and not only because of her father's political career.
Her mother's stand on abortion led to the sort of unpleasant situation which, Tizard says, she soon become very adept at handling.
"I remember sitting on the Karori bus one day and there were two women and one was saying, 'Oh well, you know why she [Cath Tizard] is in favour of abortion. I hear the daughter that's down here has had several already - and she's only 17.'
"I said, 'I'm 18 actually, and I haven't.' These women just looked absolutely stricken and got off at the next stop."
But her first stint in Wellington didn't last for long. In 1977, having dropped out of university, worked full time for Labour's research unit, and been a "hoon" in a fairly riotous flat, she came back to Auckland to continue her studies.
As it turned out, it was the year her political life began.
Helen Clark, who she knew through Labour's youth council, was living at her parent's home in Auckland (at Judith's invitation - "you blithely make these offers when you're 20") and asked Tizard to fill up Labour's local body ticket.
The choice was the power board or the harbour board. The 21-year-old Tizard wasn't interested in either, but finally caved in and stood for the power body, calling herself a barmaid - which she was.
"Helen said, 'You won't get elected ... and if you do there will be so many other Labour people there you won't have to do anything. It won't be a big deal.'
"So I stood, and really to my amazement I was elected - and I was the only Labour person elected."
Though most of the board members were "six hundred," the body was useful training. She stood again in 1980 - because the other members said Labour people only stayed for one term - and was re-elected.
But it was around this time, while still working part time to complete her degree, that she and a friend set up a restaurant called O'Connells in O'Connell St in central Auckland.
It was, she says, a progenitor to the sort of eating houses that populate her suburb now, serving local seasonal ingredients and cafe-style food.
Though it was huge fun, it became obvious after a couple of years that a restaurant and a political life weren't entirely compatible - they both required night work.
And, in 1980, Clark again persuaded her to stand for political office, this time in the true-blue seat of Remuera in the 1981 general election.
Tizard didn't win. She finished her BA (in politics and history) in 1984 and went on to full-time work as the electorate secretary for Clark and her father.
But she had become what her mother called "a campaign junkie" and over the next six years she stood in four local and central government elections.
There was the Auckland City Council in 1986, unsuccessfully, and Remuera again in the 1987 general election, unsuccessfully (although she considerably cut Doug Graham's majority).
It wasn't until the following year that she broke an eight-year drought in election wins when she was elected to the Auckland Regional Authority.
Just two years later - after her father retired from parliament and his Panmure electorate - she gained the nomination in the safe Labour seat and was elected to central government.
Suddenly she was parliamentary politician - and it had all just sort of happened, she says.
"It had never occurred to me that I would be a politician at all. I assumed I would get married and have lots of kids. I came from a big family and I thought that was an ideal.
"It's not exactly a choice not to marry, it's just never happened."
Which is something she deeply regrets - though a cancer scare in 1993 which led to a hysterectomy left her devastated and unable to have children.
But even before that awful time she had decided, after years of promising herself to get a "real job," that politics was now her career.
The 1990 general election was when she got serious about politics - up until the, she confesses, it "really had been a game."
That was nine years ago. And though between then and now she has moved into the Auckland Central seat in 1996 (moving Alliance's Sandra Lee out), she has had to sit, frustrated, in the opposition bleachers .
Some senior political commentators say that Auckland Central MP Judith Tizard has not been an effective political representative.
Tizard, however, says that estimating impact is a bit like asking how long is a piece of string.
It depends on how you judge her, she says: on whether you've asked her for specific help or support, or whether you judge her as an Aucklander.
"I have to say that I judge myself as not having achieved a great deal in terms of Auckland in the past nine years. But being in opposition and having a government that is determined to see Auckland as the enemy doesn't give you much scope. I think it's pointless criticism."
Tizard says those who think she could do better should stand against her. "I find being in local government more interesting than being in opposition in central government. I mean, there is almost nothing to do, except represent your constituents.
"It's like mudwrestling in the dark. You don't know why you're doing it, you don't know with whom you're doing it, you don't know what the stuff around you is, and it's all pretty nasty really and pretty pointless.
"Yes, there has got to be Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition, but I have to say I'd rather not be it."
Which, now, she and Labour are not.
In fact - in what was a surprise to some commentators - Tizard is now a minister outside cabinet, the Associate Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage (she was spokeswoman in opposition but is "delighted" Clark has taken the ministership), transport and Auckland issues.
The last is possibly the most intriguing. A new position and an acknowledgment by the Clark Government that Auckland's voice and troubles need more attention from Wellington, it is nonetheless unclear exactly what the job entails.
Tizard says the Auckland position is recognition from Clark that her old friend - and Tizard is perhaps Clark's greatest fan - has "some specific skills and general skills" to do the job.
It's hardly a huge step-up in pay. As an associate minister she now earns $110,000 - only about $100 a week in the hand more than before the election, because she was already receiving a large tax-free electorate allowance to cover Waiheke and Great Barrier Island.
But Tizard is taking her most serious political achievement very seriously, though she hastens to point out that the "delegation" of duties is yet to be established.
But it certainly does seem, casting your eye down her jumbled political CV, that the Auckland job may offer Tizard the opportunity to make her sacrifices feel worthwhile.
Advocate for Auckland
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