Dialogue: Chief pick for sacrifice on the altar of politics

By JOHN ROUGHAN

Maybe it has something to do with St Patrick's Day but, so help me, I'm warming to Christine Rankin. This happens to the Irish; we are a bit sensitive to persecution.

Or perhaps it's Hollywood. Even the best of them, Helen Hunt, was playing an Erin Brockovich last time I saw her.

Right now Ms Rankin (the Ms is more Herald style now than hers) is fighting to keep her job as chief executive of Work and Income NZ. Her contract expires in July and powerful people are determined it will not be renewed.

There was a time I would have been glad to hear that. But election year has long gone.

She has kept her head down and seemed to have worked things out with her minister, Steve Maharey, who had pilloried her from Opposition.

Now she has dug herself in deeper by threatening to sue Green MP Sue Bradford for calling her incompetent. That is what a normal person would do, but the public service can be priggish about these things.

Her number was up anyway. When I heard last week that she was to go, there was something mechanical in the tone. No anger, not even vengeance.

It is a cold political calculation, I suspect, that she must not be around at the next election.

Christine Rankin is said to be consulting lawyers and even inviting journalists in for a chat. We read that she says she toned down her style to conform to the new era of austerity. Sad really.

A different sort of woman is in power now and Christine Rankin's face doesn't fit.

Sue Bradford admitted as much.

"She typifies that psychology that it's all in the appearance, it's all in the look," said Ms Bradford.

"I just hate the psychology in Welfare and Labour departments that if you present well ... if you've got high heels and earrings or the suit and tie or the makeup and everything looks nice, that you'll be fit for the job."

If that is incompetence to Ms Bradford we need more of it. Every agency that genuinely tries to help people get a job tells them their appearance matters very much.

On radio this week Kim Hill suggested to a guest that someone "might not care how she looks."

"Everyone cares how they look," the guest replied.

Of course they do. Especially those who dress to suggest they don't care. They are saying something about how they regard themselves, their job and, most important, the people they deal with. Paul Holmes needs his tie.

The superficial contrast between Ms Rankin and Ms Bradford, for example, perfectly reflects the substance of their lives and outlooks.

Ms Bradford, born into an Auckland academic family, had a comfortable upbringing, went to university, got a degree.

Ms Rankin, daughter of a West Coast coalminer, left school after the fifth form, married young, found herself a solo mother in Auckland by age 23.

With her education, Ms Bradford declared herself a representative of the unemployed and spent the next 20 years fighting the idea that dole recipients should be obliged to seek or accept work.

With no skills, Ms Rankin went to the Social Welfare Department in Takapuna to draw the domestic purposes benefit and was keen to work. She was soon employed by the department and she has been in it ever since.

By all accounts, she was never the conventional public servant in vitality or dress.

At 38, she was appointed head of the northern regional office of the Income Support Service. Profiles began to appear in the Auckland newspapers. Between the abominable earrings the eyes sparkled and the girlish grin was fresh - quite a contrast to the drawn, hunted features pictured today.

Interviewers at that time found her flamboyantly feminine and speaking a good deal of working-class common sense.

Recalling her own treatment, she recruited staff who had known what it was like to be on the other side of the counter.

In fact, she did away with counters, letting beneficiaries sit at the terminals with staff.

She would not have teenagers dealing with people who had "massive life problems" and hired women in their 30s, 40s and 50s.

"Why women in their 30s are tossed out of the labour market I don't know," she said. "They will give you 10 times as much in their work and they don't go around saying they're stressed out."

When Winston Peters brought his party into power in 1996, it included Peter McCardle, whose sole purpose in politics had been to occupy people while they were unemployed.

From that deceptively simple proposition grew the merger of the income support functions of the Social Welfare Department with the job centres of the Department of Labour.

The child of that reluctant marriage would be named Work and Income NZ, with the hopeful acronym Winz.

It was to be more like a corporate personnel agency than a welfare office. It was to help people bounce up off the safety net rather than lie in it. The person chosen to lead the welfare staff in the new culture was the bouncy blond from Blackball.

Christine Rankin plunged into the project she saw as a profound social change. Like any change agent, she was willing to spend for ultimate gain.

In the climate of election year 1999 her budget would be a goldmine for Labour and the Alliance - $1 million for "rebranding," $80,000 for staff "roadshows," $1 million for refitting offices, $79,000 for a corporate wardrobe ...

And the killer: $165,000 to charter aircraft to take senior staff to a team-building seminar in Taupo. As a taxpayer I thought I would never get over that.

Now I am more concerned with the substance than appearances.

Has the substance of the change survived? Is Winz still striving to lift people up or has the more relaxed philosophy returned?

All we know is that if Christine Rankin goes it will be for appearances' sake.