Helen Clark: She's No Xena
The Sunday Age
Sunday November 28, 1999
It seems only natural that the country that gave the world Xena the Warrior Princess should have an election fought out between two female leaders.
But there is something about Helen Clark that coldly foils cartoonists' attempts to depict her as the character portrayed by her most famous countrywoman. New Zealand's probable new leader is a tall feminist with straight hair, but there the similarity with Xena ends.
Ms Clark is thin, long-faced, an ascetic, a farmer's daughter who became a political science lecturer before entering Labor politics. At 49, she has spent a long time in waiting.
It is 10 years since she became Deputy Prime Minister in the final stages of the last Labor Government, first to Sir Geoffrey Palmer, then to Mr Mike Moore.
It is six years since she became Labor leader, overthrowing Mr Moore in the wake of the party's bitterly disappointing defeat in 1993.
It is three years since she seemed set to take over as Prime Minister at the head of a coalition with the Alliance and New Zealand First parties, only to be deserted by New Zealand First's leader, Mr Winston Peters, when his enemies in the National Party outbid her, offering to make him Deputy Prime Minister and Treasurer.
If she is able to form a coalition government this time, it will be a tribute to the steely determination that is her prime characteristic, and to the credibility that she has built up with one of the world's most disillusioned electorates. A TV-3 poll this week found 46per cent of New Zealanders judged her ``more honest than most politicians".
No one would call Helen Clark charismatic, nor does her deep-voiced serious demeanor suggest a bundle of fun behind the political mask.
The same poll found only 29per cent of Kiwi voters thought she had ``a lot of personality".
But no one questions her competence or integrity. ``I like to think I'm very issues-focused," she said in the leaders' debates this week. ``I want to make a difference for ordinary hard-working folk out there who don't feel they get a fair share right now."
The eldest of four daughters from a farm in Waikato, she had an elite education at Epsom Girls Grammar and the University of Auckland, then threw herself into career, feminism and Labor politics. She is married, with no children.
While she came from the left of the party, and in the Lange Cabinet of the 1980s opposed the libertarian economics of the then Treasurer, Sir Roger Douglas, political observers see Ms Clark as a cautious, conservative operator who is unlikely to take radical measures beyond the stated Labor Alliance agenda.
© 1999 The Sunday Age