He wanted a life sentence to mean exactly that – life, no parole, end of story. Rehabilitation? ‘There are some offenders who … what are we keeping them alive for?’ This reminded me of his remark, when he formed the trust in 2001, that when you see a mad dog you shoot it. Had he ever actually shot a mad dog? He told a story.
He said, ‘You bring a dog up from a pup. You try to teach it right from wrong. You try to teach it what its job is, which is to muster. Occasionally there’s a bend in their head that you can’t correct. You can’t rehabilitate that dog. And one day it’ll go out and kill a sheep. I used to try and rehabilitate that dog, and say, Oh, it’s got some good characteristics, I’ll focus on those. But I found you can’t. You can’t rehabilitate it. So you may as well shoot it. And that’s what I do now. If I get a dog that kills, if it gets a taste of blood, I shoot it.’
Where do you shoot a mad dog? In the head? Its body? ‘Body, definitely. You’ve got to be humane. It’s not the dog’s fault. But if you let that dog continue, the rest of your dogs will start doing that. I’m linking all of this back to humans. There are some people we can’t rehabilitate. And we need to accept that.’
But we can’t shoot them. ‘Sadly,’ he said, ‘no.’
[September 2]
14 Helen Clark
To Excite the Blood
No one dresses like a female television newsreader, and it’s also a fact of modern life that no one in their right mind dresses like prime minister Helen Clark. There she was on Thursday afternoon, marching towards her Auckland electorate office in a cottage next door to a pizza parlour, and she was decked out in pressed black pants and a bright purple jacket as stiff and heavy as a shield. As usual, she was moving fast – ‘Like a southerly in slacks,’ as the television series Eating Media Lunch once described her. She looked entirely theatrical, a strange old veteran hoofer of her own stage, but in 2007 – her eighth year in power, approaching the grand figure of 3000 days – you had to wonder whether the production was The Picture of Dorian Gray.
The first time I interviewed her was in March 2000 – she turned fifty that week, and also marked her first one hundred days as prime minister. She remembered that happy hour. ‘In many ways,’ she said, ‘it seems only like yesterday.’ Strange, then, to observe that she had aged seven years in the past twenty-four hours.
Her same old self? Clark was in tremendous spirits during that ancient interview – as you would expect. Her mission had come to pass, she had finally got the mandate to proceed. She said now, ‘I particularly remember the day we were sworn in as ministers. The first executive thing we did was we had the board of Timberlands, the somewhat errant SOE, summoned to the office of the minister of finance and the minister of state-owned enterprises, and issued with a direction to cease milling native forests.’
The summons to the tower. Those were the good old days of getting rid of undesirables such as Kit Richards at Timber lands, Rosemary Meo at TVNZ, and police commissioner Peter Doone – forgotten names, dust now gathering on their mounted heads. Yes, she said, of course political life was more direct back then: ‘When you first go into government, you have to swing the wheel right around, so things are very direct, very decisive. But then you have to create.’
A year out from the next election, and with National giving Labour a sound thrashing in the polls, these are the kinds of words you can easily imagine passing the smiling lips of John Key. He’s the new force, the prime minister in waiting, all that. The same perception has Clark presiding over a tattered government in its final months.
The talk from the prime minister in her Mt Eden office – a portrait of Michael Joseph Savage on the wall, exhibits of tapa cloth and other bits and Pacific pieces, a tube of Smokers Toothpaste in the hand basin – was confident, assured, professional. She was about to head off to her eighth APEC conference to talk climate change and trade with John Howard, George Bush and other leaders. ‘I have a reasonable idea of how things will progress,’ she said. As far as reaching any accord with Howard or Bush on meeting targets for carbon emissions, it was reasonable to assume from the lack of enthusiasm in her remark that there would be little or no progress.
And then back home, back to the grind of domestic policy, of management, in the face of a tired New Zealand electorate. ‘Is it? I’m not tired, put it that way,’ she said. ‘Look, the longer you’re in government, inevitably people make mistakes. And some people accumulate the mistakes … It’s pretty obvious there’ll be a reshuffle, and there’ll be some new faces, and we have to keep generating fresh policy.’
Would anyone care? With the Rugby World Cup looming, I asked her what she thought of the old saw that a government always loses its next election when the All Blacks suffer. She said, ‘I don’t think that has any relationship at all. I think New Zealanders keep a correct distance from that sort of
