Champion of underdog now on top

By Michele Hewitson

Jenny Shipley's house and garden once made an appearance in a glossy magazine devoted to aspirational living.

It is unlikely that Kingfisher Farm, home of new MP Sue Bradford, will ever be similarly singled out.

As on most working farms, the grounds are more mud than groomed herbaceous borders. They are decorated with battered farming implements, not studded with statuary.

This is the Bradford sanctuary: home to Sue, husband Bill and children Katie, 17, Sam, 15, Joe, 9, and - when he is not at university - Richard, 23.

There are two other households on the cooperatively owned farm. A Marist priest and nun live in one and friends from the unemployed workers' movement in the other.

It is the good life that Sue Bradford had long hankered for - a haven from "the political struggle," somewhere for the country's most visible protester-turned- politician to retreat from the picket lines to bake and read the thrillers she devours for relaxation.

The tousle-headed 47-year-old, whose dress preference is very firmly for jeans over power suits, began her protest career at 16 when she was arrested after a sit-in at the US consulate.

It was something of a shock for her middle-class, professional parents. "They were not happy," she remembers. "It was really heavy. I was in the Youth Court, and Social Welfare came around. I finally left home when I got arrested again that year."

The trouble with the law cannot have come as a total surprise to her parents: a year earlier she had joined the extreme-left Progressive Youth Movement and was threatened with expulsion from Auckland Girls Grammar for trying to sell Mao's Little Red Book in the schoolyard.

But during the election campaign, her mother, Lois, was out delivering leaflets for the Greens in Orewa. Her mother and her three younger brothers have been, she says, "right behind me."

Sue Bradford has more reason than most to appreciate that support. She became "really quite alienated" from some of her family after her teenage arrests and spent seven years apart from them until she became pregnant in 1976 and they were reconciled.

"I guess they hoped I would have a professional career," she says of her cell biologist father, Professor Dick Matthews, who died in 1995, and her teacher mother. "And I hoped that myself."

She had completed a BA in history and a diploma in journalism (in the 80s she returned to university and gained a master's degree in Chinese) and was working for the Press Association in Wellington when she became pregnant and "blew it."

When she attempted to return to work, she found she could not get a job - "the classic story."

But she was never going to quietly take her place in the dole queue. She has worked, she says, "very, very hard for 16 years in the unemployed workers' movement, including setting up the People's Centres and helping to run them. They are a huge enterprise and have created jobs and provided services for thousands of people."

She was, therefore, "very hurt" during the campaign when a postcard circulated in Coromandel described her as "unemployed for years."

That work in the unemployed movement has prepared her well for Parliament, she believes. "I've been working in politics all my life. I've been through the fire a few times."

And hit a few lows. In 1992, she and Bill were remanded in custody after a street theatre demonstration. On her 40th birthday, she watched as the national unemployed workers' movement "fell apart" at a hui in Christchurch. And in 1995 her 19-year-old son, Daniel, a schizophrenic, died after falling from Grafton Bridge.

She thinks of herself as optimistic and resilient, "but I'm realistic as well." After years battling the bureaucracy, she is joining it because "there is power here and you can't ignore that."

Three days into her new job, she has only one problem: what to wear to work.

"I'm not one of the boss class. The minute you dress in a woman's business suit and high heels, it does symbolise something."

She has yet to find out what the parliamentary dress code will allow. For the moment, she is still in her jeans.