The old man didn’t answer Cunliffe’s question about how he was feeling. He had been thinking on his feet. ‘I’ll tell you what you want to do,’ he said. Cunliffe moved his shoulders back a little more inside the car. The man said, ‘With all of the billions Cullen has stowed away in the bank, why doesn’t he spend some of it to research cancer?’ The morning paper had published a report by the World Cancer Research Fund.
Cunliffe said, ‘I’m the new health minister, so I’ll be looking into that.’
The man’s wife said, ‘Aren’t you immigration?’
‘I was until yesterday,’ said Cunliffe. ‘I’m the new health minister.’
As immigration minister, Cunliffe inherited the Zaoui case; it was his decision not to allow Zaoui’s family into New Zealand while the SIS assessment of the Algerian’s security status was continuing. That drew a scornful remark from Zaoui’s lawyers: ‘Political manoeuvring.’ Mostly, though, Cunliffe avoided controversy when he held that delicate portfolio. He holds on to his role as communications minister, where his most spectacular success has been to force Telecom to work towards meeting the government’s demands of providing cheaper, faster broadband services.
That battle led to three top Telecom executives quitting, including the CEO, Theresa Gattung. Cunliffe: ‘I always found Theresa to be highly intelligent, highly energetic. I enjoyed dealing with her at a personal level. But Telecom was very much focussed at that time on short-term shareholder value, and not very focussed on its responsibilities to the country. Their performance was woeful.’
The old man’s wife was hard of hearing. She said to Cunliffe, ‘What?’
He raised his voice, and repeated, ‘I’m the new health minister.’
Cunliffe’s chauffeur drove him to a nearby beach for our interview. The tide washed in, and lay flat and listless. The October day was overcast, neither cold nor warm, vaguely moist: it wore the usual drabness of Christmas Day weather. I asked Cunliffe whether his father was a good shepherd; I drifted out on to the grey tide as he answered, ‘He certainly was to his parish. He said something to me that I haven’t forgotten, which was that he had spent a lot of his time working around the fringes of his parish, trying to draw people in, and if he’d had his time again he would have spent more time nurturing his core team. I’ve never forgotten that. And I think in health that’s very important. There are lots of layers of governance between the minister, the ministry and the district health boards, and the clinicians at the front line who are making all the good stuff happen. So I’m keen to take an empowering team-based approach, and keen to listen, and work together as much as we can, and …’ And so on.
He was a decent, earnest, not entirely humourless rooster. But he said only one thing that surprised me. I asked him what music he liked when he was an Otago University scarfie living in a flat with a hole in the floor where the water heater had leaked, and working as a barman at Regine’s nightclub from 6 p.m. to 3 a.m. He said, ‘I was into Joy Division and Genesis.’
I could see the vicar’s son listening to the brainy, hideous noodlings of Genesis, but the beauty and existential torment of Joy Division? ‘And The Cure,’ he said. ‘Soulful music. The soul has its anguishes. Music’s always been important to me in being able to get me into a …’ – he paused for thought, and finished his sentence – ‘soulful zone.’
Cunliffe was in another zone altogether with the old man in Titirangi. The childhood in Pleasant Point, Joy Division and Genesis, the castle in Wales and the ambient IQ at Harvard, six years in foreign affairs and three terms in parliament, Telecom and Zaoui and ‘vainglorious propensities’ – it had all come to a small, hapless moment in Titirangi on a flat Thursday.
His interlocutor was in the mood for an argument. The old man put his hands on his belt, pulled his pants up a little higher and said, ‘Government’s got billions. It’s just sitting there. What’s the use of that?’
Cunliffe said, ‘Did you know that four dollars out of every ten dollars the government spends is on health?’
‘Billions,’ said the old man.
‘I’ll be talking to Michael Cullen about health spending.’
‘Tell him to lower taxes.’
‘We’ll look into that too. Okay,’ said Cunliffe, and put his hand through the window for the man to shake.
‘Lower taxes,’ said the man.
‘Well,’ said Cunliffe, ‘cheerio!’
He wound up the window. Cunliffe’s chauffeur drove away. No one said anything for a couple of minutes.
[November 4]
21 Colin Meads
Country Calendar
The two men who had worked all day crutching his sheep arrived at the farmhouse before he did, and headed straight for the old fridge outside on the porch to grab a beer. They sat down and drank their Waikato on a couch by the back door. They said, Pinetree’s a good bugger, you’ll be right. It was spring weather, a fresh afternoon in November, a light breeze, seventeen degrees, the sun had come up at 6.03 a.m. and warmed the green King Country hills and valleys. They said, That’ll be Piney now. He came up the driveway on his farm bike. It cost him an effort to swing his bare legs out of the bike and place his boots on the gravel. ‘Crutched a hundred,’ he said. ‘Bloody near killed me.’ They said, Beer, Tree? ‘I might do,’ he said, and the bottle disappeared into his great paw – it looked as thin as a knitting needle, as small as an inkpot.
Pinetree, Piney, Tree, born Colin Earl Meads in 1936, but who goes around calling him Colin? I called him Colin. His name sounded so official. I felt like
