Key was totally immersed in bright thoughts of the future. I dragged him back to the past. His father, George Key, was an alcoholic who died when his son was ‘five or six’. In another interview, Key had said he had a ‘shadowy memory’ of his father giving him a toy truck, but remembered nothing else about him.
I asked about the truck. He said, ‘It was some sort of fire-engine type truck. I remember the particular occasion. I remember the day. It was a Saturday. I remember him going out and buying it for me. From memory there was a bit of a row with Mum afterwards. For some reason, that stayed in my mind.’
The household was all women – his mother Ruth, his older sisters Sue and Liz. ‘I didn’t overly notice not having a father … I remember vividly having sex education that was part of secondary school, and going with my best mate’s dad. But outside of that it isn’t something that I sat around really thinking a lot about. It was just the way it was. I just got on with it.’
The family took in boarders. ‘One guy lived with us for quite a long time. He came off a farm in Canterbury. He used to take me home to the farm in the school holidays, and I’d spend a week out there with his family for quite a number of years.’ Was he a father figure? ‘No, but I did things I could never do. Get out a .22 and shoot cans off a fence and go rabbit-shooting and drive a tractor and learn to weld.’ Did he ever have a father figure? ‘No.’
Who was George Key? ‘I don’t know. He was English. He just wasn’t on the scene.’
I said he sounded like a non-person. ‘Well, he played a relatively insignificant part in my life. I don’t criticise him for that. It’s just that’s the way it is. It’s not a hostile thing.’ A toy fire engine, a row, a Saturday – was that the sum total he had of his father? ‘That’s about it,’ he said.
[September 16]
16 Dick Hubbard
Breakfasts and Tombstones
Poor, stupid, bungling, unlovable Auckland. New Zealand’s biggest city is so careless about its future that it seems quite agreeable to the notion of electing John Banks as mayor. The man who had got thrown out on his arse three years before – after his one loud, belligerent term as mayor, he was defeated by a whopping 20,000 votes – is wearing his knuckles to the bone as he door-knocks up a storm in the lead-up to the October 13 election. He’s visible, he’s fit, he’s showing every sign of enjoying himself. But the standing mayor, Dick Hubbard, is … where, exactly?
‘Running the ship,’ he said. I met the quiet campaigner on a dismal spring afternoon at his office on the fifteenth floor of the council chambers. The ship swayed in the wind; rain lashed the windows, the sky was dark. In reception, there were books on Maori proverbs and Nelson Mandela, and a new mayoral robe designed by an AUT student for Air New Zealand Fashion Week – in all seriousness, it was made from merino possum silk yarn.
It was worn by a dummy. I hoped when His Worship appeared that I would be able to tell the difference. I have always held a soft spot for Hubbard. In my long career, I can lay claim to trying to finish a few people off, but the only time I have been in on the ground floor of anything remotely significant is that I was the first journalist to interview Hubbard. It was before he came to fame as the man who said all those very sincere things about corporate social responsibility, took on the Business Roundtable, and emerged as a business leader who seemed to have a vision, a cause, a moral purpose.
I interviewed him in 1994 because I liked the little magazine that tipped out of the breakfast cereals he made as chairman of Hubbard Foods. It had puzzles, jokes, thoughts for the day, and very sincere messages about treating people with respect. It was better than reading the morning paper. It revealed an interesting mind. So I bowled out to his factory in Mangere and met a strange, nervous, engaging fellow who wore a white shop-floor jacket that read, ‘HI. I’M DICK’. ‘That was the journey,’ he said on Thursday, ‘that led me to City Hall.’
He was less fun than the singular rooster I remembered in Mangere. He remained nervous – the stuttering, the hands scratching at his elbows – but it felt like he took up more room, had a heavier presence. He seemed even stranger. A tall man, lanky and long-limbed, he was like some pious Jehovah of the mountains, who had tramped a path into the city to teach it some manners. He pointed to the pair of climbing boots and his pick and his rope that he used to climb Mount Cook in 2000. ‘I’m a mountain man through and through,’ he said. ‘For me, that’s a great spiritual place.’
It had been out of character for Auckland to elect someone with principles. Now, with Banks ahead in the polls, perhaps poor, stupid etc Auckland is bored with its experiment, and wants Hubbard out.
He talked about his decision to run for mayor in 2004. He was already thinking about it when he attended a business meeting in the council chamber. ‘Everyone filed out for morning tea. I saw the mayor’s chair, and went and sat on
