Backstage boffin in limelight

By AUDREY YOUNG

Mark Prebble has become the very antithesis of the grey, anonymous public servant he strives to be.

He cannot step outside the Beehive in Wellington without being fingered as the man who told ex-Winz chief executive Christine Rankin her clothes were "offensive" and "indecent."

Dr Prebble heads the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, the elite of the Government's policy advisers. He is noted for his directness.

If a proposal doesn't stack up, he will say so, making no allowances for finer feelings.

Mrs Rankin requested his advice and agreed that he could speak bluntly to her about her appearance. So he spoke - well - bluntly.

"Every time she moved, I found that I was having to see an embarrassingly large amount of breast exposed," Dr Prebble told the Employment Court this week of one particular meeting with her.

"I didn't like it."

Dr Prebble is unusual, even idiosyncratic.

He is married and has two boys and two girls. Nothing unusual there. But he is known to enjoy doing tapestry and has been seen wearing a kaftan at a Wellington beach near his home.

He enjoys tramping and as a young man he climbed rocks and mountains.

His first wife was killed during a blizzard on Mt Cook.

One of six siblings, he is a younger brother of Act leader Richard Prebble and used to carry the older brother's hockey gear to games for him.

Taking propriety to extremes, the pair have not been alone together in the same room since the 1970s.

Dr Prebble was in the Treasury under a National Government. His brother was then a Labour MP. The habit has stuck.

Their father, Kenneth Prebble, was an Auckland Anglican archdeacon, though both he and his wife, Mary, have converted to Catholicism.

Dr Prebble has not had so much media exposure since his appointment was announced in 1998.

Prime Minister Helen Clark was leader of the Opposition then and she denounced the Treasury deputy secretary as "an apostle of the new right."

His colleagues figured he would have no problem adjusting to a new regime.

They were right. Unlike Christine Rankin, he was reappointed in October last year.