Oh Lord it's hard to be humble when you're perfect in every way, so the song went that hit the air waves in 1980. It came out five years after Ashburton primary school teacher Jenny Shipley joined the National Party, and listening to her reflections on the two years she spent as New Zealand's first female Prime Minister, that song resonated as she told us of her drive and her ability to have people follow her.
Did she want the job that Jim Bolger had held for the previous seven years? It became inevitable, she schmoozed. Having broken that glass ceiling, she said it wasn't exceptional then that Helen Clark followed her onto the ninth floor of the Beehive. But it was inevitable!
But in reality, rather than laying the ground work, she'd dug her own grave. In fact National had hung on by the skin of Jim Bolger's dentures, ever since Shipley and her buddy Ruth Richardson took the meat cleaver to welfare in their first term, cutting it by up to 25 percent and raising the pension age from 60 to 65.
Twenty years on Shipley remains unapologetic, reasoning you can't have people on welfare earning more than those out working for a crust. In 1993, National went from a landslide win to a one seat majority and three years later only made it back into Government, thanks to Winston Peters.
So ironically Shipley can thank Peters, who she later sacked, for her place in history, not that any gratitude's being forthcoming on that front. On her collaboration with Richardson, she bristled with indignation when it was put to her, with her musing it's easy to "poke the torch at the girls in the family," saying men in politics are seen as bold whereas women are viewed as vindictive.
