Richardson is fifty-six, short, robust, cheerful. Her handshake is as immediate and firm as an electric jolt. She had made a delicious batch of muffins for her guests, who arrived a little bit late; she had given directions to her home on a long flat stretch of country road, but missed out a detail. ‘You didn’t say turn right,’ I said. I should have seen her reply coming: ‘I always say turn right.’
Her reforms – immediate, firm – cost her the finance portfolio after the 1993 election. ‘She has become the most hated minister in the history of this country,’ said Labour’s Michael Cullen. Well, Cullen can always be relied on for a personal attack. (Richardson: ‘He’s the worst practitioner of sarcasm in parliament. It seems to be in his DNA.’) But a measure of her unpopularity is that she had to go out in public with the diplomatic protection squad. Prime minister Jim Bolger offered her another post in the cabinet; she refused to compromise, and retreated to the back benches. Bolger’s appointment of Winston Peters as treasurer was a bridge too far. ‘He was a hopeless case,’ she said. Richardson quit parliament – and the National Party – in 1994.
She now runs Ruth Richardson [NZ], hiring herself out as a governmental and corporate consultant: ‘I’m an example of a politician privatised.’ Business is good. Last week she was in San Francisco; this month, Brazil; after that, Paris. She also has clients in Jordan, El Salvador, Macedonia, Pakistan, Mauritius, the Caymans … the list goes on. She also has directorships in firms, including British Telecom, Marlborough’s Oyster Bay vineyard, and Jade Software in Christchurch: ‘Our latest contract is to build the port IT system in Gdańsk. I remember saying in parliament, “New Zealand’s economy is like a Polish shipyard!” And now here I am in the business of supplying the IT to a Polish shipyard.’
Had she in any way changed her philosophy from her spectacular term as New Zealand’s finance minister? ‘The philosophy is good for all seasons,’ she said. ‘I’ve taken a consistent view about how I see a philosophy around the liberty of markets, the liberty of choices, and personal liberty.’
She was like an antique clock that kept perfect time. The bookcase with Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman, the regular frowning newsletters from the Centre for Independent Studies … She had the same New Right cant and rhetoric of old (‘The war is lost if you think the answers lie with the state. They don’t. They lie with the individual’). Her fervent certainties, her exhilarating visions of prosperity, made her a kind of economic fundamentalist. But it’s been fourteen years since she was able to leave, in her words, ‘a footprint’ on New Zealand public policy; how did she reconcile herself with the relative powerlessness she now had as a private consultant?
‘There are three great causes in life,’ she said. ‘There’s nation-building, and for a time I obviously put myself on the line to help contribute to what I saw as a better nation. There’s business-building, and a lot of my policy activism was about creating a better forum in which business was able to generate opportunity and wealth-creation.
‘This phase of my career is about business-building. Okay, you don’t get to paint on such a big canvas, and you’ve got to live with government policy and make the best possible decisions. But … I mean, nobody can be involved in public policy as a prime mover forever. There’s a time and a season. I had my time, I had my season … I had my chance. I took it. I’m proud of what I did.’
The third great cause in life, she said, ‘and obviously the basis upon which it’s all built, is the family’. Richardson’s husband, Andrew Wright, is general manager of her business consultancy. Their son Oliver is off soon to Cambridge University, and has hopes of becoming a biotech entrepreneur; daughter Lucy is now Dr Lucy Wright, vet and army territorial. She graduated the same week that her father-in-law, animal scientist Dr Evan Wright, died.
Richardson’s own father died two years earlier. ‘He was hugely influential on my career,’ she said. ‘He was a very strong man. Like I do, he took sides. He’d be at National Party conferences, hammering away on remits; he was an activist, as I am. In a sense I got my radicalism from him. He was a private-enterpriser, and he was very happy to defy conventional wisdom.’
She told a story. ‘When I became a cabinet minister, he lined the family up and said, “You’ve all got to be on your absolute best behaviour, and pay absolutely to the last dollar all of your taxes.”’ She told another story. ‘I have a strong memory of when I was a girl going to accountants’ and lawyers’ offices with him. There was an expectation I’d involve myself in the affairs of the family, not just at a familial level but at a financial level as well.’
Strong, responsible, decisive … In an address she gave in 2000, Richardson wrote, ‘Each nation needs a Caesar, a champion who develops a vision that excites the citizens and persuades them of the merit of change … Every Caesar needs his Maximus, a general installed in the administration. That person may typically be the minister of finance.’
I asked the bleeding obvious: Had she been a Maximus? ‘Yes, I was. Every Caesar needs somebody who’s going to fight, and be prepared to execute.’ But in regard to Bolger, she was a Maximus without
