Roosters I Have Known

by Steve Braunias

  All the pretty aerodromes, all the gabbling roosters … Wayne Idour in Dunedin, in a winter so cold that the night sky had nowhere to go – rigid and flat as iron, it bolted itself to the ground. Adam Rickitt at the Shortland Street studios in Henderson, in early summer, beside a mangrove creek at low tide, listlessly dragging itself over the mud. The series ended just a few days before Christmas, when I interviewed God. Well, the spirit of God, anyway, in the kindly presence of Anglican minister Glynn Cardy. It was a nice, easy way to go out. Perhaps a few months earlier I might have given him hell. But it was pleasant to sit in the church crypt and listen to the twenty-seventh and final voice on my TDK cassette blather gently about faith, Jesus, spirituality and other fanciful notions.

  Now and then my mind strayed, and I thought: I might miss doing this for a living. There were pleasures of travel, and bringing back soft toys for the baby – a grunting pig from Wellington, a squealing haggis from Dunedin. And the best thing about the job was writing. I suppose I regard the pursuit of language as a purpose. But it was a shame that it involved interviewing people. Apart from feeling vaguely repulsed by the private detective, I didn’t hate anyone. I wished the best for each of the twenty-seven roosters I met in 2007. They said smart and touching and funny things. It’s just that as the weeks went by – to tell the truth, I thought this in the second week – I wanted to leave them alone.

  1

  Ruth Richardson

  Shine On You Crazy Diamond

  Meat Loaf was there. He was a whopper. Stephen Stills was there. He was a double whopper, who waddled lonely laps around the room. Perhaps he had the exact same thought on his mind as I did while I watched the golden star of the 1960s now pace morosely inside a basketball stadium in an Auckland suburb in 1991: how had he ended up here? It was an invite-only charity concert. Dinner tables were laid out in front of the stage. The show also featured a set from Nelson, two lean, long-haired American twins and the sons of ’50s pop star Ricky Nelson. One of them brought his delicate new girlfriend Erin Everly, the daughter of one of the Everly Brothers; she had just broken up with her abusive husband, Axl Rose. Pale and chalky, she looked so miserable that it seemed as though she was about to dissolve.

  In all, it was a strange line-up of stars who were flown in to play that night, but the strangest presence and most dynamic performer of the evening was Ruth Richardson. She stole the show. Dinner had been served to captains of industry and society matrons; in conduct most unbecoming of a minister of finance, Richardson danced her way across the tables, scattering dessertspoons and champagne glasses, when Meat Loaf and Stills joined forces to play a horrible, raucous encore version of – you could say this was apposite – ‘Bat out of Hell’.

  Richardson’s romp was a sight not easily forgotten. I’ve harboured a secret admiration for her ever since – secret, because she was, and remains, so notorious, such a pariah of both the left and right (Nicky Hager’s revelations that National Party leader Don Brash engaged in email contact with Richardson helped end his political career in 2006), an unacceptable name to bring up in polite circles. Another way of putting it is that no modern politician has matched her sense of daring and purpose. The current National Party leader John Key is often asked, ‘Aren’t you just Labour with tax cuts?’ A question like that was unimaginable when Richardson held the finance portfolio, and swept through her radical right-wing reforms in her famous ‘Mother of All Budgets’ in the same year she upstaged Meat Loaf.

  Her antics that night made me suspect she was a good sort as well as a good sport. When I instigated an exchange of emails with her about an interview, I reminded her of her table dance, and she responded by attaching photographs of her latest hobby – stilt-walking. Even so, by the time I visited Richardson on a lovely autumn day at her rural home in West Melton, Canterbury – the firewood stacked in sheds, a gardener pottering among the flower-beds – it still came as a surprise when she so readily agreed to the photographer’s request, and promptly stripped off to loll in her swimming-pool in a bathing suit.

  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 a Caesar? ‘Yes. There was a disconnection between Douglas and Lange too. Lange was certainly a Caesar on the world stage on nuclear issues, but on the economy he was content to be a follower not a leader, and in the end he had a bad case of amnesia. He was prepared to accommodate Douglas, just as Jim Bolger was prepared to accommodate me: for a time.

  ‘Caesars to me are about the big picture, with a huge strategic direction, and having the boldness and authority to see that through … Yes, Thatcher, definitely. Sarkozy, probably. Reagan, certainly.’

  What a cast. It was like a concept album, something far-reaching and monstrous, as performed by Meat Loaf. Richardson also counts herself as a fan of Midnight Oil and U2. ‘But Pink Floyd is always my default position. I used to do all my exams by turning up Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here really loud.’

  What a force of nurture (‘My father was a very strong man’) and nature (‘Prepared to execute’) she was, what an embrace of life and its opportunities to create chaos. She was made for her time in power; now, though, MMP had ‘stuffed up’ New Zealand politics: ‘MMP banishes any impulse for radical reform. It’s all about tactics and no long-term strategies. You see it every day, in government and in opposition.’

  I asked her whether she saw New Zealand as state bureaucracy versus the innovative private sector. ‘I think there are three New Zealands,’ she said. ‘You’ve got the rulers, who will be good, bad or indifferent. Then you’ve got the governed, who fall into two categories. There are those who are kept in the zone, and the zone is: “This is what the state will do for you”. We’ve just seen writ large in the latest budget the fatal conceit that this government has the answer to every economic and social ill, that somehow it will dictate how we live happy and fulfilled and successful and risk-free lives. Yeah, isn’t that great?

  ‘So you’ve got dependency New Zealand: stay in the zone, be a drone, be dependent on the state, and be grateful for it. Then you’ve got what I call the discovery class – the ones who want to go out of that box. Unhappily, many of the discovery New Zealanders go and discover elsewhere.’

  But there was nothing new or original in that speech. The lines creaked with age. She was consistent; she had the same message, the same philosophy that was ‘good for all seasons’. In the early 1990s, she was in a position to alter New Zealand in her image. She was the woman who needed a war. She seemed such a dangerous person back then; now, though, her power stripped away, she just seems like a good sort, a marvellous and harmless antique, a brisk, hearty woman – Gladiator in togs.

  [June 10]

  2

  Chester Borrows

  Chester’s Patch

  Most people in Chester Borrows’ world are roosters. As a former cop, he once met the disgraced assistant police commissioner, Clint Rickards. ‘Unusual guy,’ he said. ‘A sullen sort of rooster.’ Now, as the National Party’s police spokesman, he has debated with Annette King, the minister of police. ‘Yes, well,’ he said, ‘she’s a sharp sort of rooster.’ On Friday, he held a private meeting with Hank Pullen, president of the Patea chapter of Black Power. ‘He’s all right,’ Borrows said. ‘He’s a quiet sort of rooster.’

  They met in Patea’s abandoned primary school. It was closed in 2005 by education minister Trevor Mallard. A chill wind blew over the netball courts and hopscotch squares; inside, a blackboard left behind a sad relic of order and learning – the alphabet, spelled out carefully in chalk. Patea has never truly recovered from the 1982 closing of its freezing works, and loss of over a thousand jobs. The dismal fate of the primary school makes the small Taranaki town (population at the 2006 census: 1,143) feel even more emptied out. The freezing works is now derelict. The school is all ghosts.

  Borrows sat in the middle of an empty classroom with Pullen and another senior Black Power member, Ngapari Nui. The Whanganui MP was there to discuss the gang insignia bill he is about to attempt to introduce as law. A public referendum in Wanganui has voted in favour of banning gang patches worn in public places; as the local MP, Borrows supports the initiative, and will present the bill in parliament.

  The two Black Power men have known Borrows on and off for many years. He was the sole charge cop in Patea between 1985 and 1988. After the meeting, they stood outside in the playground. ‘No patch, that’s one thing,’ said Pullen. ‘But what about the T-shirt, the cap …’ I asked him what disadvantages there would be if the bill was made into law. He said, ‘It’d be a new crime to be arrested for. Fines. Money that takes food out of the mouths of families. I’d say that was a disadvantage.’

  He didn’t say much else. A quiet rooster. He was a short, serious man somewhere in his forties; you could tell by his hands that he was a hard worker. He gave away none of his personality: it was stored away for another time and another place. ‘Last time I arrested him,’ said Borrows, ‘was when he shot someone point-blank in the stomach.

  ‘But the thing about that was that incident – and it must have been about 20 years ago – was just totally … no one could believe he was actually involved in it. It was just so out of character. He was a guy who was running stock, grazing beefies and doing pretty well, and he had a lot of respect locally. He wasn’t someone who was close to trouble.’

  Or since, as far as Borrows knew. ‘As far as Black Power in South Taranaki goes, they’re virtually all employed. I’d say ninety percent of them are working and paying taxes. I could have driven you past their houses. They don’t have a whole shitload of money. Ngapari – you can tell by looking at him there’s not a hell of a lot of money there. And Hank’s living in a small house, it’s an ex-state house or whatever.’

  As well as his involvement with Black Power, Nui was on the Wai-o-Turi Marae committee, helped manage its successful Kii Tahi plant nursery (‘You name it, we’ll grow it, apart from that plant that gets you into trouble,’ he said), and was working to find ways to hire out the primary school. Neither he nor Pullen wore their patches at the meeting. Borrows confirmed that Black Power in Patea hardly ever wear them in public; there’s no need to state membership – Patea is a Black Power town.

  All of which made the bill seem an unnecessary harassment, an almost flippant kind of measure in Patea. Green MP Metiria Turei has jeered at the proposed law as ‘another foolish example of easy politicking for no real gain … it will turn our cops into fashion police’. Well, said Borrows, the bill would achieve a feeling of safety for people as they go about their business, and it would also create neutral territories – no patches, no conflict between rival gangs.

  It was inevitable that Borrows would refer to the tragic death of Wanganui toddler Jhia Te Tua. The two-year-old daughter of a Black Power member was killed in May in a Mongrel Mob drive-by shooting.

  Borrows said, ‘As I understand it, the day baby Jhia was killed, there was a scrap in a public park
between Mongrel Mob and Black Power, because they were both watching a league game and they were all wearing their patches. Now, if they weren’t wearing their patches, would there have been a fight?

  ‘Well, actually, pretty good money would say no, there probably wouldn’t have been. So when you look at the … sort of accumulative tension, then actually not wearing the patches at that league game may well have meant that baby Jhia wasn’t killed.’

  What sort of rooster was Borrows? ‘Bright and jovial,’ he said. Oddly, his photograph plastered all over his electorate car was a portrait of a melancholic. It made him look as though he’d just heard some bad news, and was in despair. That may be a familiar expression. As a lay preacher, Borrows is often called in to act as a funeral celebrant.

  First-term National MP, fifty, a big fellow – ‘I wasn’t always this overly dimensional’ – the loudest voice in parliament speaking out against Green MP Sue Bradford’s child protection bill (Hansard: ‘The public of New Zealand are hanging on this debate!’), fond of strange metaphors (Hansard, from the same speech: ‘Sue Bradford knows there are at least eight of her troops swallowing rats over this bill’), a straight-up middle New Zealand guy.

  I trooped along with Borrows to the Wai-o-Turi Marae, where he went to discuss a business deal with Nui and others managing the plant nursery. The sea looked cold as ice; the wind had no mercy. As we approached, Borrows said, ‘On a day like this, you can understand why the Maoris sold their land for blankets and matches. You know what’s important? Warmth. It was probably a good deal back then.’ And then he knocked on the door of an office, took off his shoes, and bowed his head during the karakia.