Fond memories of a trouble-maker

By AUDREY YOUNG political reporter

Trevor Mallard has been reminded of how far he has come.

Not just from Labour's top front-bench thug in Opposition to most valued player in Helen Clark's cabinet, but from his early days as an education activist.

Before heading to the final days of the Olympics wearing his Sports Minister hat, an unlikely protest last Wednesday at the Post Primary Teachers' Association conference in Wellington took the Education Minister and his memories further back.

Two wriggling guinea-pigs were let loose on the conference floor by former teacher Maggie Lovekin, of Levin. Shouting as she was being bustled out, she was upset at the prospect of the National Certificate of Educational Achievement, which will replace School Certificate and Bursary exams in 2002.

This is one of the most serious issues facing Mr Mallard as a minister, and it is crucial that he win the support of the association in its ballot next month. But back in his office, he allowed himself a chuckle at the protester's antics.

The guinea-pigs put Mr Mallard, a protest veteran himself, in mind of his own days as an activist, which included being hauled out of the public galleries of Parliament during an anti-SIS bill demonstration and being arrested during the 1981 Springbok tour.

But one act was particularly subversive and the embarrassed minister thinks it is time he owned up to it. In 1976, when he was the 22-year-old student president at Wellington Teachers' College, he clashed often with the college hierarchy.

One day an advertisement appeared in the situations vacant columns of a Wellington newspaper inviting applications for the position of college principal, left "vacant" by Alan Mackie.

Placing the bogus ad was Mr Mallard's protest against Mr Mackie, whom at the time he did not rate very highly but who now "actually seems quite reasonable."

"I don't think I've ever done anything as creative as that," Mr Mallard, now 46, said of his protesting career. "Applications came from all around the world."

Neither the college nor the newspaper was amused and an apology was published. Although Mr Mallard may have been a prime suspect, a witch-hunt never exposed the culprit.

Guinea-pigs aside, last week was a weighty one for Mr Mallard.

It was his first appearance as minister at the annual conferences of the primary teachers' union, the New Zealand Educational Institute, and the secondary teachers. Labour education ministers are routinely called "puppets" of the teacher unions, and he has been a member of both.

But there was no attempt to cuddle up to the two powerful unions. In fact, what he delivered to both conferences was, in essence, a reality check.

His aim, he said later, was to dampen any excessive expectations the teachers might have of the Government, especially over staffing.

"I have an enormous list of things I want to do as Minister of Education. Probably three-quarters of them involve more spending.

"The Budget allows for about $550 million worth of extra expenditure next year. Proposals that I have had for extra staffing in schools could spend three times that money in one year."

The message: if the money is handed out too freely, the economy will suffer and the Government will last just one term.