PM happy to break mould

By MICHELE HEWITSON

When the candidate for Mt Albert walked into Parliament in April of 1982, she walked into a boys' club. Of 92 politicians, eight were women.

Now, of course, Helen Clark runs the club. She's the big boss who won't generalise about what sorts of bosses women make. "A lot of people write about women's style as decision-makers as being different - less hierarchical structure, more human approach. Then someone will say: 'Well, what about Bloggs?'."

Bloggs believes in the hierarchy. In a hierarchy, everyone has to laugh at the boss' jokes. I've seen her on the telly running her caucus. Everyone was laughing at her jokes. That is one definition of power.

Let's try it this way: has having a woman running the country changed anything in the way the country is run?

"That's not straightforward to answer. Because I think the role of the state and how you define that is very important to policies for women. And what can be as important is, really, what overall philosophies, instead of policies, you bring to the job."

So, "Jenny Shipley was also a woman Prime Minister but she stood for a state that was shrinking and got less involved in ensuring there was appropriate market regulation and social provision. I personally think that the best combination from the point of view of women's interest and equity issues is a Labour female Prime Minister." This makes her laugh quite a bit. And, yes, she agrees, "Of course, I would say that."

I'd asked her whether she'd been miffed that Shipley became the first woman PM when Clark must have had every expectation that she would be the first to put on that particular crown. She is emphatic: "No. I actually think it's probably a compliment to me that the National Party felt they needed a woman to try and see me off." She thinks this is pretty funny too: the idea of a National Party seeing her off is, to Clark, patently ridiculous.

Take a stroll through Parliament buildings and there are signs that Clark rules here. Or rather, the signs which once proclaimed this place to be an old boys' club have been taken down. "It's changed out of all recognition," she says grinning. "When I walked into Parliament ... women were obviously in a very small, marginalised club." The favoured forms of recreation were card schools, the billiard tables, the bar. She once wrote about a sense of alienation, of men playing billiards in a room where, on the odd occasion women were included, they were included as a sort of joke. Helen Clark, as she usually does these days, has had the last laugh. The billiard tables which once graced the Great Hall "have been moved to some far corner. I have no idea where they are, but at least I don't have to see them any more".

A cosmetic change, perhaps. But it represents a particularly Clark approach to the business of politics. It's also tempting to see the removal of those billiard tables as a victory over those male politicians who made a young female MP feel so alienated and whose harmless games with balls and cues represented a club in which she would never be welcome and did not, in any case, wish to join.

I have visions of Clark and her mates, Judith Tizard, Ruth Dyson, Margaret Wilson, sneaking about the hall in the middle of the night leaving directions to the movers to whisk the things away to some poky, pongy corner of the building. How much credit would the PM like to take for their removal? "Well, all I can say is the changing patterns in Parliament where fewer people were playing billiards was the most important factor."

Is there an old girls' club? "No, not really." Is there a middle-aged girls' club? "Ha, ha. No not really. Not in the sense that we meet for lunch and dinner." Why not? "We're all too busy." Those billiard tables were doomed from the beginning.

That Clark is PM is at all is, she says, an accident of birth. She grew up on the family farm in Te Pahu, the eldest child in a household of four girls. "Because we had no boys in the family, my dad's aspirations and expectations were lived out through the girls." The luck of the draw, then? "Well, it helped."

It is somehow odd to hear Clark say "when women take on a lot of the top positions in the country, there's a tendency to think, 'oh the battle's won'. It isn't." The woman who likes to climb mountains in her spare time says that "unless you've got a critical mass of people coming up behind, a few exceptional individuals getting to the top isn't the answer".

She's done her homework: There has been a slip in the number of women in Parliament this year, from the 37 elected in 1999, to 30 of 120 this term. There are only 15 per cent of women on private-sector boards. Of 110 judges, 29 are women.

To her, such figures demonstrate a need for vigilance. "If you're not protecting gains won, they can slip into the background again."

But I also suspect she gets tired of hearing that "bloody women are running the country", as though this is some sort of disgraceful fact. Her interest, she says, "is in building the base over time so we can build in an expectation that in the normal course of events it's not unusual to have a woman Prime Minister. And I'm sure," she says with the trademark laugh, which indicates that what she is about to say strikes her as being a very novel idea indeed, "There'll be a male Prime Minister again".

Clark's preference would have been to become the country's first unmarried female Prime Minister. She would not have bothered "formalising the relationship if I hadn't been going into public life. I think that these days no one would, but 21 years ago social attitudes were a little bit different".

She volunteers that "there are choices, and I've made choices. I couldn't have done what I've done and had a family. Let's face it, our grandparents had no proper access to contraception, so they had as many babies as came along. And now we think our lives are stressful? Make some choices and work out what suits you. Childlessness is a choice and I've been very happy with that."

A session with Clark on being a woman at the top, leaves you feeling as though you've attended a positive thinking workshop. Is it really as simple as she makes it sound? "That's my simplistic view of it. We are just so much luckier in the choice we have." Surely, though, there are stresses associated with making those choices? "Not as much," she laughs, "as not having any choice."

She takes her status as a role model seriously: if she can pull herself up by her blue stockings, so young women, can you.

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