Radio New Zealand - Te Reo Irirangi o Aotearoa

Salient's Helen Clark story

Transcript

Sunday, 19 October, 2003

This is the full text of 'No, Prime Minister', a feature interview with Helen Clark printed in issue 22, 2003, of the Victoria University students' magazine, Salient. It attracted both warm praise and angry derision. The author, and then editor of Salient, Michael Appleton, was interviewed on Mediawatch on October the 19th.

Mediawatch believes the claim in the story that Helen Clark "seldom bothers showing up to Parliament anymore (her attendance record this parliamentary term is worse than any other PM in living memory)" is inaccurate. Figures provided by her office indicate that from the 28th of August 2002 to 12 August 2003, there were 135 oral questions to the PM or Minister of Culture and Heritage, Helen Clark responded to 65% of these. Helen Clark was in the House 37 out of 66 days (56%). Since June, she has answered 14, Michael Cullen 13 - about 50% each.

Clark's comments on the Iraq war - which are referred to in the story - and the subsequent reporting of them, have previously been examined on Mediawatch.

Twelve days ago, Salient sat down with Prime Minister Helen Clark in her newly renovated office on the ninth floor of the Beehive. Relaxed and in command, Clark was every bit the 'competent and popular' Prime Minister she has described herself to be in recent weeks. However, there are many reasons that Clark may not be remembered as fondly by history as she would want, Michael Appleton writes. Photos by Matt Nippert.

IN 1986, HELEN CLARK gave what is still the most revealing interview of her thirty-year political career. She told author Virginia Myers that when she arrived in Parliament in 1981 she felt it was like 'being a third former in a new school'. As it transpired, a more precise analogy might have been an opinionated, feminist third-former arriving at a conservative, single-sex boys' school.

Soon after she arrived in Parliament, the Labour Leader whom she had stuck by through prolonged hard times - Bill Rowling - was rolled by a caucus faction supporting David Lange, a young, fat lawyer raring to take on the world. Clark told Myers that she found the Lange faction 'incredibly sexist'.

'I don't see any way that a woman could ever have got admission to it. People like [Mike] Moore and [Richard] Prebble can't help appearing sexist. Part of my problem for being overlooked for any office is because I belong to another faction of the party, but part of it is also I'm a woman. I remember one colleague flying off the handle at me in Caucus. He muttered, "Don't be such a silly ..." and he clearly wanted to say bitch - it was on his lips - but he shrieked, "Don't be such a silly woman!" It was an extraordinary explosion. But it was quite typical.'

Thirteen years after the Myers interview, New Zealanders made Clark head prefect of the school that she had found so unaccommodating in 1981. She has now held the head prefect's badge for close to four years, and is clearly at ease in the role. One suspects that she intends to hold on to it for the best part of a decade.

But what sort of head prefect is Helen Clark? Is she accommodating of newcomers to her school? Does she make Parliament a place where everyone - no matter their gender, their political persuasion or experience - can feel welcome? Well, no doubt she would answer this question in the affirmative. No doubt she would wax lyrical about the tolerant society she has tried to foster. In fact, when I ask her what sort of society she is trying to create, tolerance immediately springs forth.

'I speak a lot about tolerance of, and respect for, each of the cultures in New Zealand. There is no question that the indigenous culture has a special place, and a lot of what defines New Zealand as unique is Maoridom. So I think that's important, and there are a range of obligations arising from the Treaty, which you have to be mindful of. One of the challenges is giving some wider public understanding of the history of New Zealand, and what happened.

'Because if there's a greater awareness of what happened, people might be more sympathetic to the treaty settlement process than they are. But we battle away at trying to promote attitudes that are tolerant, inclusive, understanding, which isn't always easy when you've got extremists on both sides of the debate. You've got the people who would rather that the rest of us got in our waka and sailed away again, and you've got those who don't want to recognise that there's any significance in indigenous people in New Zealand.'

Tolerance is a rather slippery concept. A question that social liberals are often asked is: Are you willing to tolerate anything? Or, are there no social attitudes or practices that you find morally offensive?

But one doesn't need to get back to first principles with the Prime Minister. For all she talks about tolerance, it is quite clear that she is a very intolerant person. She's intolerant of people who have different political views from hers, she's intolerant of ministers whom she perceives as incompetent, and she is intolerant of journalists who criticise her.

When I ask her what sort of leader she is, her reply illustrates the paradoxical way in which she likes tolerance as a philosophical concept, but not as a political practice. She says of herself: 'Firm, not afraid to lead on key issues. A front foot leader on issues. Leave people in no doubt about where you stand. Endeavour to deal with people fairly. Not tolerant of silly attacks or nonsense. Yeah, I think providing firm direction, a clear set of policies, signal what you're going to do, get out there and get on with it, matter-of-fact, no messing around. Pragmatic. Practical.'

Clark is broadly intolerant of anything that gets in her way politically. During the last election campaign, when Nicky Hager released his book Seeds of Distrust about the potential release of sweet corn contaminated with genetically-engineered material, Clark let rip at the Greens. 'I am sickened at the way these allegations have been levelled at me personally and at the Government and its officials in general. I am going to sing from the rooftops that this is a very dirty campaign where the Greens and their supporters have descended to the gutter of the National Party.'

When Corngate was brought back into the spotlight this month by a select committee inquiry, rather than debate the issue on the facts, she refused to testify in front of the committee, and instead got stuck into her opponents, accusing Jeanette Fitzsimons and Nick Smith of 'colluding' in an attempt to smear her good name. 'I sometimes wonder whether I'm a victim of my own success as a popular and competent Prime Minister.'

But vitriol is how Clark commonly responds when attacked. When TV3's John Campbell confronted her with the corn allegations during the election campaign, she was quick to turn on him. She called it 'despicable' and 'unethical' journalism, and referred to him as 'that little creep'. In March 2001, she called former National MP Wyatt Creech a 'scumbag' and a 'sleazeball' for

having raised the issue of a potential conflict of interest involving Clark's husband. In July 2001, she labelled John Yelash a 'murderer' after he claimed her government had asked him to find 'dirt' on former Maori Affairs Minister Dover Samuels. Anyone - no matter whether they are attacking her from the left or the right - who has slightly different view to her on race relations is labelled a 'racist'. And, any ministers of hers who do anything slightly daft - Marian Hobbs or Dover Samuels, for example - get 'flicked', as she has so eloquently put it.

Indeed, while the Prime Minister might be trying to bring about a tolerant society, she is doing so in a way that bears all the hallmarks of intolerance: she is unwilling to debate her opponents on any great number of issues because she believes she holds the one and only acceptable view.

This might seem a rather tangential discussion: so, the Prime Minister is an intolerant person? So what? Well, scholars of leadership often speak of how well a leader's message 'fits' with their actions. That is, does the leader personify the message they are espousing? A good example of a leader embodying his message was Former US President John F Kennedy. JFK spoke a number of times about building a more tolerant society. So what did he do when Ban The Bomb protestors turned up outside the White House in 1962? He sent out coffee and doughnuts to help them through the rainy afternoon, and invited the protest leaders into the White House to discuss their concerns with him. Afterwards, he said his actions were driven by a belief that dissent and debate were healthy parts of the democratic process.

Can anyone imagine Clark acting similarly? Not likely, because doing so would actually imply that a decision she had made was in any way debatable, a view to which she is not willing to subscribe. She seldom bothers showing up to Parliament anymore (her attendance record this Parliamentary term is worse than any other prime Minister in living memory), and she tries valiantly to dodge any questions thrown her way during Question Time. All of which illustrates that she believes her decision-making is above debate.

And, sure enough, when protestors against the government's 'fart tax' turned up at Parliament recently, Clark didn't reach out à la JFK. Instead, she insulted their intelligence by saying, 'Government policy is based on substance, not hot air. It's [the protest] an ill wind that blows no good.'

Previous New Zealand governments have been turfed out when there has been a great difference between the rhetoric and the reality. The Fourth Labour Government was tossed out because, while David Lange said in 1987 that it was time for the country to have a cup of tea (that is, the costs to social cohesion outweighed the benefits of continued reforms), his government decided instead to just keep on going. The Bolger Government became breathtakingly unpopular in its first term because its caring rhetoric aimed at the elderly was not matched by action. And now, while Clark talks the talk of a tolerant society, not since Robert Muldoon has New Zealand had a leader so intolerant of anyone who questions her as Clark.

This is also illustrated in her tendency to be hypersensitive and defensive in the face of criticism. Linda Clark noted on Nine To Noon recently that no one quite gets under Helen Clark's skin like Green Co-Leader Jeanette Fitzsimons. While Fitzsimons wouldn't be drawn by Linda Clark as to why this might be, one possibility is that the Prime Minister recognises a lot of her former self in the Green's pin-up girl. Fitzsimons is idealistic, willing to forego power to stand up for what she believes in, and thoroughly left wing on such bread and butter issues as foreign policy and education.

When Fitzsimons says she would rather be out of government than negotiate on genetic modification, Clark possibly recognises someone she used to be: a believer in bold policy stands, regardless of the political consequences. It was Clark, after all, who from behind-the-scenes pushed David Lange to lead the Fourth Labour Government into a full-scale diplomatic confrontation with the United States over nuclear weaponry. And it was Clark who entered politics because she was emboldened while at university to take a stand against dominant forces in the world that she couldn't abide: the United States' foreign policy in Indo-China, South Africa's apartheid policies, and France's nuclear testing in the Pacific.

Of course, now that she is the Prime Minister, her ideals remain the same, but the part of her brain devoted to political calculus has not allowed those ideals to have their evil way with her. On the war in Iraq, she probably wanted to berate George W Bush for his dangerous actions, but held her tongue for the good of the country and her poll ratings. After September 11, 2001, she probably wanted to give the United States a good telling off for what she saw as its misdeeds throughout the world, but thought better of it.

Many forget that Clark was the leader of the left wing of the Labour Party in the long years of dispute between her grouping and the right faction led by Mike Moore and supported by Michael Cullen and Phil Goff. Indeed, Clark is almost certainly more left wing than her government. She would sorely love to spend more on tertiary education, for example, in an attempt to quieten the protesting students. (The student protests over the fee maxima scheme in July were said to have hit Clark hard. She still has many friends who are academics, and thus is well aware of the attitudes on campuses around the country towards her government. The government's craven backdown over the fee maxima scheme, while infuriating to Vice-Chancellors, was perfectly understandable given the Government is led by a number of left-leaning academics.)

One imagines she would sorely love to tax more so that she could spend more on such things as our foreign aid budget, which is, after all, well below the United Nations target of 0.7 percent of GDP, something of which our well read Prime Minister must be keenly aware. But any hopes she has of leading a government in keeping with her ideals are dashed by her sense of political reality. In Cullen, she has a budget hawk and a member of the right faction of the party as Treasurer and her deputy, ensuring that none of the social policy ministers spend too much money, and projecting the politically vital image of a party that is a prudent manager of the economy. Clark is pathologically frozen with fear that if she does anything too outrageously left wing, the business community will come down on her hard.

Fitzsimons, then, represents her younger, more idealistic self - a person she would love to be more like, but a person she is trying frantically to push out of her consciousness, lest she feel too guilty.

CLARK AND I talk in her newly renovated office for close to half an hour. During this time, she only raises her voice once. Interestingly, that is when I ask her about a New Zealand Herald article written the week before by Victoria University politics lecturer Jon Johansson.

Johansson wrote: 'If ever the country needed its Prime Minister to provide an overarching, explanatory framework on the future of race relations, it is now. At the elite level, discourse on race relations is maladaptive and out of step with the discourse below the level of those who maintain a vested interest in exploiting division for political gain...

'The challenge, then, is for the Prime Minister to exhibit real leadership during this difficult time. A continued vacuum will simply not do, for the purpose of leadership itself is to act as an instrument for social adaptation. That is, leadership is something from which society can learn more adaptive strategies to improve the quality of its choices.

'The time is right, right now, for the Prime Minister to make an appeal to our better angels. It is time for Helen Clark to force the spring.'

When I raise the issue of rhetorical leadership with Clark, she is quick to dismiss the suggestion that she might be wise to try it every now and then. 'What happened to him [David Lange]? See, that's the thing, the charismatic leader always falls over. It will work for a while, but then it'll fall over because the rhetoric will unravel. And I go for a very practical, in-your-face sort of style. Here's where I want to go, here are the things I want to do, this is what we're going to do, follow me if that's the way you want to go. And it's no fools, really, and I think in the long term Kiwis are more comfortable with that.'

The above statement illustrates the amazing transformation that Helen Clark has had to make in the last seven years. Many people forget that, as recently as May 1996, she was so deeply unpopular that many in her Caucus wanted her replaced as Labour Leader. However, during the election campaign of 1996 she transformed herself from an aloof academic who spoke in too sophisticated a manner for television, into a simple straight shooter who anyone could understand. The in-your-face style that she alludes to above is her way of saying she dumbs down her message for public consumption. She says in very simple, practical terms what she's going to do so that everyone can understand, and then she does it. That is why words such as 'vision' or 'philosophy' are so rarely uttered by our Prime Minister.

It actually takes some work to get Helen Clark the well-read academic to reappear, but she still lurks deep within our Prime Minister. We start talking about her early involvement in politics during her time at Auckland University, and I suggest that she probably would have been called a socialist back then. She frowns, for she's not a great fan of the s-word (perhaps because of its Soviet connotations), and says matter-of-factly: 'I think I've always been a social democrat.'

Her early interest in politics came through foreign policy, as she took part in the anti-Vietnam War, anti-apartheid, and anti-nuclear testing movements. 'They were issues that were important [to me]. But having got involved with the Labour Party in those issues, I then became more and more interested in social democratic issues around equality of opportunity and education.'

Clark spent fourteen years at Auckland University - as a student (1968-1972), and as a junior lecturer then a lecturer (1973-1981). She says now that she had a 'wonderful time' at university, both in completing her studies and in taking part in a myriad of political activities. Of her time as an academic, she says: 'I loved it. It was fantastic. At the university on staff, you had the pleasure of being paid to read and think and research and lecture and discuss issues in your subject with people behoved to doing that, and I think it was a wonderful job.'

The rose-tinted nostalgia with which she speaks of her time as a student and an academic raises an interesting question. Students no longer have the luxuries that she had as a student with no fees, a universal living allowance, and a boarding allowance. And academics no longer have the luxuries that she had in the 1970s with small classes and plenty of resources. In the over twenty years since she stopped lecturing, student-to-academic ratios have doubled. And certainly, her government has done little to alleviate these concerns - fees have risen under Labour, access to a universal allowance is not forthcoming, and while student-to-academic ratios have reached a plateau, funding to reverse the trend of the last twenty years is certainly not forthcoming.

I ask her whether she thinks it's a shame that students and academics so often don't have the time to take part in the extra curricular activities she so enjoyed. She ponders, then says: 'Yes. When I was a student, I don't recall people working at night or at the weekend for paid work. We had a universal allowance. I was a student from out of town, so I had a boarding allowance as well. We were all expected to work over the summer holidays, I never had a holiday over the Christmas, New Year break. I think if one can avoid working part-time through the year, it's desirable because you really need the time to put into your course.' (New Zealand University Students' Association figures show that just 35 percent of university students are in no paid employment during the university year, but that's another story.)

In any case, Clark's sense of social democracy blossomed while in the Political Studies Department of Auckland University, led by the left-leaning Professor Bob Chapman. When I ask her what social democracy means to her now, Clark offers the definitions of two eminent European politicians: former German Chancellor Willie Brandt ('as much social justice as is possible, as much market as necessary') and former French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin ('I believe in a market economy. I do not believe in a market society').

Says Clark: 'So it's getting that balance between market and government regulation right. And, you know, what is the purpose of being in government? The purpose of being in government is to maximise the opportunity and security of your people, and to recognise that the state has a very important role to play in that. It doesn't happen by accident. Workers will only get adequate protection if the legal framework makes that possible. Law can advance social change and does. Yeah, we endeavour to strike that balance.'

THE PRIME Minister's obsession with managing the media is well known, but you don't quite appreciate its excesses until you experience them first hand. The psychological warfare begins when you ask for the interview. That is, her staff are going to make damn sure that she isn't put in a position that she will find uncomfortable. John Campbell ensured that.

The back and forth between Helen Clark's Press Secretary Jocelyn Prasad and me is revealing on this point. When I initially put the interview request to Prasad, she asks that I send through a list of topics that I want to discuss, presumably so the Prime Minister can do her prep work. Also, one assumes that were I to have sent through a list of prickly topics relating to the Government's failure to better fund tertiary education, or to live up to its promise to keep tertiary education affordable, the 'too busy' sign might have been slung in my face, or I would have been told to interview Steve Maharey instead.

I ask for an hour with Clark, knowing that I won't get it, but hoping that starting high will snare me at least 20 minutes with her. Then Prasad starts firing the questions at me, via email. Could I do the interview over the phone? Am I going to do a Q and A or write an article? How long will my article be?

Interestingly, the first words Clark utters to me when we meet some weeks later is a repetition of one of these questions: 'Are you going to run this as a Q and A or are you going to write an article?' It's not hard to understand why she'd be interested in this matter. Q and As are a lot safer for controlling politicians such as Clark; the resultant piece is predictable - just a straight replaying of the interview to readers, with no room for analysis or commentary. An article in which the author actually places the interview in some kind of analytical context is much riskier. What if I don't like her?

Of course, Clark could pretend that she really doesn't care what Salient - a speck on the wart on the news media's bottom - has to say about her, but her actions lead one to an entirely different conclusion. During our interview, she has in front of her an email from Prasad in which my indicative topics are listed, and stapled to it is a thick stack of papers which, presumably, Clark had either read prior to our interview or had there to fall back on if things got testy.

Prasad's role in the interview situation is also interesting. Presumably, she doesn't remain present to keep an eye on the Prime Minister, who can probably look after herself. Rather, Prasad's presence is a subtle reminder that you are being watched. Your interview is being recorded, so you better make sure that what you write about the Prime Minister is fair and accurate. Interestingly, Prasad isn't content to record my conversation with Clark with her state-of-the-art dictaphone; she also sits quietly to my right taking shorthand, reinforcing the message that I shouldn't even think about misquoting Clark, or about taking something she says out of context.

After the interview, I ask Prasad via email why she records interviews and takes shorthand of them. She replies: 'We tape all interviews, I take notes from time to time just so I can remember interviews better. The PM's probably the most quoted person in the country; taping interviews gives us a back up if she's misquoted or when others refer back to the interview sometime afterward.'

THERE'S NO doubting that Clark's true love is foreign policy. Everything else seems boring in comparison to the big, international stuff. Her media tastes bear this out. She has, she tells me, subscriptions to The Economist, The Guardian Weekly, The Statesmen, The Progressive, The New Internationalist, and The Prospector. She used to also get The Nation, but she started to lose interest and didn't have time to read it any more.

She says she relies on the above publications for her foreign news because 'I don't think the New Zealand media does foreign news very well at all'. Her verdict on political reporting in New Zealand is just as scathing. 'Well, the only in-depth coverage is Radio New Zealand, let's face it. The Herald keeps four full-time journalists in the Press Gallery, but you wouldn't know it from the average daily publication of the Herald. It devotes either page six or page eight or half of it to Parliamentary coverage, and it tends to have the sensational. The Herald used to consider itself a newspaper of record. That is no longer true. [As for] TV, it's quick headlines, nothing in-depth.'

Given the amount of time Clark spends thinking about international politics, one wonders why she didn't keep the foreign affairs portfolio for herself. That said, she still plays an instrumental role in formulating her government's foreign policy; it just so happens that Phil Goff gets to front it. But Clark is certainly proud of her country's place on the world stage.

'We're four million people, and by international standards, that's a small country. But I think most people would say that for its four million people, New Zealand has a far higher brand of profile than most small countries do. It's generally seen as punching above its weight. It takes on issues as a matter of principle, and long has.'

She then recalls how the First Labour Government 'dared to speak out against' the Italian invasion of Abysinnia (now Ethiopia) in December 1934. Says Clark: 'New Zealand has always been very forthright from the time of the First Labour Government on, and I think that's an admirable thing. Small country, bigger voice.'

So, what has her government taken a stand on? Clark sighs, as if the answer is oh-so-obvious, then launches: 'Well, I guess we've taken a stand on a number of things. Iraq, obviously.

We held a very firm line on multilateralism, and the desirability

of not setting bad precedents for unilateral intervention, and the UN to keep charge of the issue. Issues like the resolution of the Tampa crisis, we had messages from all around the world about that, [from people] who saw New Zealand come in to resolve the impasse for humanitarian reasons. I think those are the things that will stick in people's minds.'

Of course, the way Clark tells the Iraq story now and what she said at the time are two very different things. Clark's handling of the war in the media was more than a little perplexing. She started out by carefully avoiding criticism of the United States, Britain, and Australia, telling Parliament: 'Our Government is determined that this difference of opinion, substantial as it is, will not damage long-standing friendships which we value.' She said that her government fully understood the frustration, impatience and outrage felt by the 'coalition of the willing' at Iraq's resistance to United Nation's resolutions to disarm.

However, she subsequently made two outbursts in which her true feelings came through: the first saw her claim that the war in Iraq wouldn't have happened under a Gore administration (which is undeniable, Gore has said so himself), and the second saw her tell the The Guardian during a trip to the United Kingdom: 'This is a century which is going to see China emerge as the largest economy, and usually with economic power comes military clout ... I don't want precedents set, regardless of who is seen as the biggest kid on the block ... Who wants to go back to the jungle?'

So, having said that she would try not to let the difference of opinion over the war affect New Zealand's relations with the US, UK, and Australia, she couldn't help herself, and took these two opportunities to mouth off and assuage her guilt. This was hardly idealistic foreign policy at its finest, but rather a Prime Minister caught between what she wanted to say (that the war was sheer, immoral lunacy) and what she felt it was politically acceptable to say. On these two, brief, occasions, her conscience won out.

Of course, Tony Blair is still paying the price for going to war with Iraq. In the Hutton Inquiry, Blair has subjected himself to public scrutiny of the sort that Clark would never allow. Last month, The Listener's Finlay Macdonald wrote a compelling editorial on the lessons Clark could learn from the Hutton inquiry and the events that led to it. The editorial read: 'If any conclusion can be drawn at this stage it might be that there are limits to the power of spin and to public relations in general. Heaped upon itself it becomes dangerously unstable, at some point reversing a fundamental theory of political relativity and becoming the one thing it should never be - the story itself. If nothing else, Downing Street's chief spinner (in more ways than one) Alistair Campbell cannot survive allowing - indeed causing - that to happen.

'Those who would have had Helen Clark sign up with Blair and Howard for Washington's crusade should be pondering just what mess that might have created here, too. For everyone else the lesson should be simple: spinning makes you dizzy, then you fall down.'

I ask Clark whether she has been following the Hutton inquiry ('Yes'), and what lessons she might have learnt from it. I ask this question with Macdonald's editorial in mind (and there can be no doubt that, in addition to her pile of international periodicals, the Prime Minister also reads New Zealand's leading liberal left journal), but she either doesn't know what I'm getting at, or ignores the implication.

'Well, I think the basic lesson is that if you're going to take a country to war, be very, very sure of the case. I know Tony Blair reasonably well, on a leader-to-leader basis. My first meeting with him was in 1995, when we were both leaders of the Opposition ... He's a conviction politician. He believes, and is very, very sincere about what he believes, and I don't personally think he sets out to deceive anybody. Unfortunately, the information on which they acted does not appear to have been great.'

What Clark has in fact described are the thoughts of a cognitive miser - someone who only takes onboard information that is in keeping with their pre-existing beliefs (in Blair's case, that war against Iraq was justified), and who filters out anything that runs counter to those beliefs. Thus, it wasn't so much that the information that Blair got was bad, but rather that he was intellectually incapable of processing it with enough analytical distance so as to see it for what it was: a very confused picture which most certainly did not point to Saddam Hussein posing an imminent threat to the security of the West.

Clark's stout defence of Blair is interesting, though, because she presumably has periods as a cognitive miser too. Her ability to only selectively recall information about Corngate is an obvious example: it seems now to be more a case of her having genuinely convinced herself that her government did no wrong in its covering up of the episode, rather than her cynically painting that picture in the media. With Clark, her self-assuredness is such that one imagines that doubts are quickly purged from her mind once she has decided on a course of action.

THE TWO leaders that Clark most respects are Nelson Mandela and former Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland. The former is an obvious choice. Says Clark: 'The stand out leader of the 20th Century is without a doubt Nelson Mandela, because Mandela demonstrates the incredible characteristics of humanity: magnanimity, generosity, forgiveness, reconciliation. There could be no better role model.'

However, it is worth noting that Clark doesn't exhibit these traits to any great degree. Take her treatment of the National Party, for example. She is not magnanimous, or forgiving, or generous, or conciliatory. Clark's enmity towards the National Party dates back to 1981, when she was subjected to a character assassination during her ultimately successful campaign to win the Auckland seat of Mount Albert.

As she told Virginia Myers: 'It was a difficult campaign. As a single woman I was really hammered. I was accused of being a lesbian, of living in a commune, having friends who were Trotskyites and gays, of being unstable and unable to settle to anything. If you elect Helen Clark, my political opponents said, she's for abortion on demand and our whole society will change overnight.'

In Brian Edwards' hagiography of the Prime Minister, Clark illustrated the depth of the ill feeling she still has towards the National Party. 'Over the years you still get the National Party rumour-mongering, most recently that the marriage has broken up. When Peter [Davis, her husband] went to Christchurch they ran that one round. It never stops. I've heard National MPs interject, "What about your affair with so-and-so?" They never stop. They're relentlessly personally nasty. The one thing I hate is the National Party. I think they're loathsome people. I do.'

So, not much Mandela-like forgiveness here. In fact, some political observers believes that the only reason that New Zealand is not governed by a grand centrist coalition between National and Labour is that Clark won't allow it, such is her enmity towards the people who have called her names.

Gro Harlem Brundtland is a revealing choice as the other leader she most admires. Of her, Clark says: 'The Labour Prime Minister of Norway, similarly small country, similar style. Firm, woman leader, no nonsense, running in a multi-party environment, social democratic. A lot of parallels.'

Brundtland went on to head the World Health Organisation. However, perhaps her most compelling contribution to international relations was the concept of sustainable development, which many trace back to a 1987 report entitled Our Common Future, released by the World Commission on Environment and Development that Brundlant chaired. The commission argued that the world would not be able to sustain the growth needed to meet the needs of the world's growing population without radically changing course on such issues as energy efficiency, economic expansion, and resource management.

Presumably, Clark would quite like such a posting when her time is up as Prime Minister (Secretary-General of the United Nations being the most sparkling prize). I ask her to assume that she wins

a couple more elections, after which it comes time to retire from New Zealand politics. What then? 'I've never given any thought to what I would do when I left here. I might go and sit on a beach for twenty years.'

Salient: 'That wouldn't be quite your style would it?'

Clark: 'No, I'd be very bored very soon, I would think. No, I haven't given any thought at all. I only think as far as the next election, really. As long as you're running, you've got a very clear target, and you just get on with it.'

BUT IF Clark doesn't want to talk about the future, she is willing to talk about her legacy. How will she be remembered? She frowns, perhaps thinking she can't possibly be expected to predict what other people will think of her in the distant future. However, she reformulates the question, and then answers it.

'How would I like to be remembered? A whole lot of things, I guess. I think the things we're doing with the economy are very significant. We've kind of had to bring the country back off the extremes of hands off, into a more 21st Century, Third Way style of economic management, which sets out clear strategies. What's the economic path? What's the Government's role in uplifting, modernising the economy? I think the end result of that is going to be an economy that is much more prosperous in this virtually no tariff environment, globalised economy that we have to operate in.

'Second, I would point to a whole lot of initiatives right across social policy. From public health, to education, to housing, to superannuation - those things are all core to a Labour government. I think it will certainly be a progressive, social legacy, if you look at everything from prostitution law reform, to smoking to updating guardianship laws, to property relationships. There are a long list of these things. This is a liberal government in that sense.

'And then I think internationally, I believe [I will leave] with my head held high, saying New Zealand has been a good international citizen, and has stood strongly for multilateralism, and be proud of that. I will be able to point to a lot of things around the environment, conservation which have been very progressive.'

However, the 'practical', 'pragmatic' gradualism that Clark has adopted since coming to power in 1999 does threaten her aspirations of being remembered fondly by the electorate. So slow has Labour's change been that many of its core voting groups - blue collar workers, university students, and Maori, for example - have started to get a little miffed, wondering when the distinctively left-wing agenda they voted for four years ago will actually materialise.

When Tertiary Education Minister Steve Maharey spoke at the New Zealand University Students' Association conference in Palmerston North earlier this month, one of the first things he said was that he wanted to dampen expectations. And that's the rub: if you spend your whole time in government dampening down expectations, telling your core constituencies that you can't give them what they want because you have these other factors to consider, how will you be remembered? As a competent, long-serving, undistinctive Prime Minister like Keith Holyoake or Jim Bolger, who will be forgotten by history. And here's what Helen Clark had to say about Holyoake as he strove towards his fourth election victory in 1969: 'Holyoake had become a figure of fun, a caricature of himself - the booming voice, the marble in his mouth. The students had no time for him. They thought he was pompous with nothing to be pompous about.'

Sounds familiar.

Clark is running out of friends. The media are more suspicious of her. She is burning bridges with the Greens, and United Future will be much more at home on social issues with National than Labour. Interest groups are tired of being patronised by a Prime Minister who lashes out at anyone who criticises her. Indeed, as happened with Robert Muldoon, it could well be that what seems now to be Helen Clark's decisive and purposeful leadership will come to be seen as authoritarian and paternalistic rule, to which very few New Zealanders will gladly subject themselves.