There is seldom a second act in New Zealand life. In the last year of his political career, former Labour MP John Tamihere was duped, disgraced, and inevitably dumped; he is now a talkback host on Radio Live. He’s a refreshing presence, funny and warm-hearted, but that kind of job really only has the status of a professional clown. I interviewed him at the station. He said inexplicable things, he was all over the shop – he seemed totally bereft of purpose. A couple of months later he ran back towards power, towards some purpose in his life, as a mayoral candidate in Waitakere. He lost.
Bob Parker won, in Christchurch. This tumultuous rooster, with his addictions and his sensual enthusiasms, had come the opposite direction from Tamihere. Parker was a very popular clown in his long years as a TV presenter. Duped and dumped, he entered local politics, where he has most assuredly found his purpose. Good luck to the citizens of Christchurch. Dick Hubbard lost, in Auckland; he had been guided into the mayoralty three years ago by a burning but hopelessly naïve sense of purpose. In his mayoral office there was a terrible metaphor of his impending doom: the pair of mountain boots he wore when he climbed Mount Cook. It was painfully clear when I interviewed him that he had lost his confidence, lost his footing. It was all downhill.
Recent polls say that another keen mountaineer, Helen Clark, is headed the same way. If she does lose at the 2008 election, what purpose will she find to serve? An ex-prime minister can be a pathetic sight, a ghost haunting the corridors of power and trying to summon a frightening boo – do please take off that white sheet, Mike Moore. Power becomes Clark. Her sense of purpose was as solid – and stubborn – as a rock when we met in September. Everything was in place. The steady blue eyes, the honking laugh, the bad teeth; when she listens, her top lip rests over her bottom lip, her chin lowers, and she looks as though she has just swallowed a large potato. We have all become so familiar with that face. It’s like a town you have to drive through every day. The 2008 election threatens a motorway bypass.
The following week, I traipsed to Napier to interview John Key. He’s a nice fellow. I also thought he was an empty vessel, floating on nothing more substantial than his own ambitions: politics was something to do, it occupied the hours, it daubed him in purpose, like a fake tan. He was laughable, a nonsense. So why was he so popular?
After our interview, I watched him address a hundred or so Hawke’s Bay tykes at a waterfront bar. It was a bad performance. Yes, agreed a sharebroker who was knocking back the Bolly, he was a blithering idiot. But she didn’t mind that in the least. She saw the real John Key, detected his shining example of wealth. ‘Bullion,’ she said, ‘shines from within.’
As Key chuntered on, I was reminded of Norman Mailer’s campaign diary when Richard Nixon ran for the US Presidency in 1972: ‘It was possible that no politician in the history of America employed so dependably mediocre a language in his speeches, nor had a public mind ever chased so resolutely after the wholly uninteresting expression of every idea.’ Mailer talked of Nixon’s followers ‘who are so proud to have chosen stupidity as a way of life’. Nixon won that year by a landslide.
Purpose lost, purpose found, purpose wanted – this search to act out a significant role, to do something worthwhile, went beyond the farmyard of politics. I came across other roosters with a cause. Auckland University academic Paul Buchanan wanted his purpose back, and something more tangible, too: his livelihood. When I met him at his home on Auckland’s west coast, he was like a man stripped bare. The bizarre circumstances in which he lost his job came as he suffered a physical breakdown. At the time of writing, he has yet to appear in the Employment Court, where he hopes to regain his position in the political studies department. New Zealand needs public intellectuals of Buchanan’s stature. I really hope he wins his case, which is also to say I really hope the pathetic little university authorities lose. Shown the door, tossed aside, he was like a bear with a sore head as he raged and ranted in his Karekare cave. He seemed very glad to have company.
Buchanan’s cause was his own. Social issues attract the purposeful intent of visionaries, quiet everyday heroes, bureaucrats, lunatics and the emotionally unstable. The year’s biggest apparent crisis – child abuse – quite rightly galvanised the nation. To do what, exactly? Three-year-old Nia Glassie’s awful death added fuel to Garth McVicar’s holy fire of punishment. As head of that restrained lynch mob the Sensible Sentencing Trust, McVicar gives genuine and invaluable support to the families of victims. But he also has some wretched ideas. When I talked to him, McVicar had just returned from Arizona, where he saw merit in tent prisons. New Zealand needs those, he said. Whereabouts? Middle of the Desert Road, he said.
It’s not going to happen. It was mere whimsy. At worst, he was playing make-believe with his sense of purpose. I also thought that of Cindy Kiro, the Children’s Commissioner. We spoke on the day of Nia’s death. Education,
