Dialogue: Bad timing put paid to this career

By JOHN ROUGHAN

On election night 1999, when she came out to acknowledge defeat, Jenny Shipley said what a privilege it had been to be Prime Minister of this country.

She was in a hall in her home town and, as politicians do when it no longer matters, she was talking to the people there rather than to the television camera hovering at her head.

It was a moment of candour, I thought, from a woman who could seldom manage to relax and be real in front of a microphone. After her predictably dignified resignation this week she was still needlessly stiff and huffy, even to questions about her plans.

Like many National politicians, she could talk to almost anybody more easily than to those who would report and interpret her words. Labour MPs tend to be quite the reverse.

One day during the 1993 election campaign, when the Churches and the welfare lobby were howling about the benefit cuts, she came to Christine Fletcher's electorate.

The host MP took her to a supermarket, where the two of them grabbed trundlers, tossed in a few items they didn't want and moved down the aisles.

That's what political campaigning is like these days when nobody goes to meetings. You could tell that Jenny Shipley hated it but she managed to engage people surprisingly well. I began to despair of exchanges that would enliven my story.

There was a guy on a bench watching from a distance. He said he was unemployed. My biro quivered with excitement. What was he thinking?

"Oh she's good, eh."

What about the cuts to the dole?

"Had to be done, eh."

People are so damn reasonable, at least to a Government nearing the end of its first term. The mood was vastly different by the time Mrs Shipley made it to the top.

Her sentiments in defeat were all the more touching at the end of a year in which, let's face it, she never had a fair go.

Remember the dinner with Kevin Roberts, the endless Tourism Board business (what was that about?), the remark that John Hawkesby was going to cost TVNZ a million dollars (which turned out to be an understatement) and whether she had been joking when she said she made it up. (That was a moment she did allow herself to relax, off-camera with Linda Clark.)

Nobody wants to remember. They were stale subjects even at the time. In any other year they would have received a fraction of the attention.

It was ritual slaughter, really, of a Government that was never going to win the election. It had lost legitimacy from the moment it hitched up with Winston Peters in defiance of his voters' will.

Replacing the leader (twice) had not saved Labour after David Lange had similarly defied the voters' 1987 endorsement of Rogernomics. The fate of Sir Geoffrey Palmer and Mike Moore awaited Mrs Shipley when the party turned to her.

Why did she go for it? Helen Clark had resisted a similar opportunity in 1990. As deputy to Sir Geoffrey, she let Mr Moore go to the guillotine for that Government.

Late in 1997 Mrs Shipley had more than her coalition's unpopularity to contend with. History was against her. National was effectively in its third term. In 50 years only one Government (Keith Holyoake's) had won a fourth.

How different things might have been for her had she waited. Had Jim Bolger gone on to the 1999 defeat, Jenny Shipley undoubtedly would have become National's leader last year.

By now she probably would be struggling to make much headway against a safe, centrist Government in its first term. But she would have been wearing the mantle of a possible Prime Minister rather than a defeated one. It makes all the difference.

Instead, her problems followed her into Opposition and in desperation her judgment deserted her. Everything she tried seemed to spin the wrong way.

Not long before that fateful trip, she called a press conference at Parliament to announce National's resolution of an issue the Government has been wrestling with for a while: whether parents will still be allowed to physically punish their children.

Mrs Shipley believes strongly that they should, within reason. The hard part is to define the boundaries in legislation. National's solution: cuts and bruises were to be evidence that parents had gone beyond the law.

The news: National would let parents hit their children as long as they leave no cuts and bruises.

It was a sad end to the career of one of the most important figures in New Zealand's late 20th-century economic liberalisation. She and Ruth Richardson were the driving forces of the Bolger Government in its best years.

Had she not toppled him when she did, she might eventually have led a properly mandated Government of her own. She probably does not dwell on what might have been. She took the opportunity when it came. It does not come to many. When she said it had been a privilege I think she knew the chance would not come again.