Roosters I Have Known

by Steve Braunias

  Meurant: ‘I don’t want this to be about me. It’s not about me. It’s about the issues.’ As soon as we sat down in the café, he opened up his laptop and read from a prepared statement. This dictation, with asides, took nearly thirty minutes.

  Highlights? He read out: ‘Behind every tree they see a bad guy.’ And: ‘As a detective in the mid ’70s I applied to go to university. I was asked: “Are you a communist?” … My lecturers included Helen Clark, Phil Goff and Michael Bassett … The first rays of lights began to appear. Slowly the mists began to abate and I saw things from a different perspective.’

  An aside: ‘The things that some of these people were teaching, I just thought were a crock of shit. I’d probably share their views now.’ He continued his dictation: ‘I’m immensely grateful for how those institutions unwittingly helped me exorcise the demons of excessive exposure to police culture.’

  Also: ‘I’ve had experience with the Police Complaints Authority and it’s just a farce, a laughable mockery. That only leaves one institution, and that’s the fourth estate.’ He took off his glasses and said, ‘I never used to think that. I just thought all media people were bastards. I thought like a policeman: they should all be shot.’

  I began to miss that Meurant. You knew where you were with him – he was unequivocal, primitive, disgraceful. As second in command of the police Red Squad during the 1981 Springbok tour, he wrote a book about that experience, and cast himself as a heroic warrior who defended New Zealand against the anti-apartheid protest mob. Later, as an MP, he criticised National leader and prime minister Jim Bolger’s decision to apologise to Nelson Mandela for 1981, and argued that the police should have used stronger force.

  Another of his books, The Beat to the Beehive, was reviewed thus by historian Michael King: ‘Outstandingly bad … Laughable … Sinister.’ King concluded: ‘Keep your eye out for an ex-policeman with near psychopathic inclinations. And avoid him.’

  Know thy ghoul. But who was this strange rooster who now talked gravely of a ‘constitutional crisis’ at a garden centre in Remuera, where crazy old dames creaked out of their Mercs? He spoke of himself as ‘the new Ross Meurant’. He was Lazarus among the gardenias. But I suspected he was doing what he’d always done: scaremongering, spuriously.

  ‘All of a sudden,’ he said, ‘the police have the power, through this anti-terrorist legislation, to take away our rights before our very eyes. If they can get away with that, where to next? I mean, maybe they won’t like who you vote for. Maybe they won’t like who I vote for. Who knows?’

  Meurant now lives in Prague. He said he works in corporate and agricultural trade: ‘Everything’s up for sale in eastern Europe. There are always enormous opportunities where there is deregulation and privatisation.’ At least his economic principles remained consistent: ‘I think Roger Douglas saved the planet.’

  Similarly, his reason for selling his infamous aluminium PR24 police baton from the 1981 tour on Trade Me: ‘I’m a capitalist.’ He said he got $20,000 for the ‘stick’, which is now in a museum in South Africa.

  This was a Meurant you could recognise. Still, it seemed entirely reasonable when he said, ‘I’m pleased with me that I grow and evolve and change my opinion. I’d hate to be thinking as I did when I was a detective on the drug squad.’ And you could very easily say it was brave of Meurant to speak out against the cops. ‘They’ve always been the same,’ he said, ‘always stretching information to their own ends.’

  He gave an example when I asked him about his role on June 23, 1970. He knew instantly what that date meant: as a constable on his first homicide, Meurant searched the garden outside Harvey and Jeanette Crewe’s house. He said, ‘I’m the guy who raked that bit of dirt where subsequently the partial bullet was found.’ This was the cartridge that had led to the conviction of Arthur Allan Thomas, who was later pardoned for the Crewe murders and the cartridge ‘discovery’ discredited.

  Meurant continued, ‘I gave evidence in court to say I sieve-searched that garden methodically, exactly as the manual said, and there was no bullet there. Pressure came on me, from the highest authority, to say that I’d actually been careless and that’s why the bullet was subsequently found. I remember saying to one very senior officer that you can’t seriously be expecting me to go and say, “Well, maybe I did cock up and missed it.” There’s no doubt the bullet in its cartridge case was planted.’

  As for the ‘data’ collected by police to obtain warrants for the seventeen people arrested in the anti-terrorist raids – he doubted that it amounted to anything more than loose talk, perhaps a few unlawful firearms offences.

  Meurant has long experience of the culture he now wants to damn. You might describe him as a credible witness. But I doubted his claims that he had been exorcised of his demons by attending university. It was as though he was saying he had been raised by wolves, but education brought him into civilised thought. If he really had changed his views, then something else, something more intimate, was the agent.

  Meurant told a story. It began as the reason he left New Zealand for Europe. He said, ‘What I noticed most when I finished parliament was the phone stopped ringing. It took five years for me to hit the bottom. I went out and bought a farm, taught kids how to ride horses, and kind of atrophied. I didn’t realise at the time it was taking a toll on my self-esteem.

  ‘I was on a contract in Australia in 2003, and all of a sudden I started to cry. And I thought that was just bloody stupid. Ross Meurant doesn’t cry. But I cried, and I couldn’t stop crying. I got off the plane back over here and spent some time with my kids, and they encouraged me to go see a shrink. Which I did. Three sessions, at three hundred dollars a pop.

  ‘He was able to explain to me where I was at. He said, “You were a hotshot in the police, a hotshot as an MP, and all of a sudden you’re nothing, you’re nobody, and it’s taken you a little while to work out that you’re not in control of things as you were before.” And I’d just lost the farm through a second matrimonial cock-up …

  ‘So that’s the human side of why I left. I am human. I did cry a lot. And then I thought, well, I’ve got to do what I know I’m best at, what I’ve got experience at, so that’s how I ended up, on my own initiative, flying into Russia. I made contact with somebody I knew from the days when I was a director of the Russian bank Prok down here. And all of a sudden the mists cleared for me in respect of my own personal problems.’

  I asked him whether he had been describing depression. ‘Oh yeah. I mean, I couldn’t drink a glass of water without feeling like I was going to drown. I was going nowhere, and nothing was happening.’ Was he happy now? ‘Never been happier. I enjoy where I’m living, I’ve got an entrepreneurial career. I look at some of my peers who retired from police, and I get the feeling they’re just hanging around waiting to die.’ A sense of purpose was important to him, wasn’t it? ‘Yes. And that’s probably why I ended up a crying mess.’ And then he said, ‘That was a critical turning point for me in the things we’re talking about.’

  He meant the policing issues. How so? ‘Well,’ he said, ‘now that you’re talking to me about it, I suppose that was the critical point. Because when I emerged from that, I read this book by the Dalai Lama. It was only a pamphlet; I just happened to be reading it somewhere. Basically his argument was, don’t fight negative battles. It made me realise that I’d fought so many negative battles. It was fighting enemies, you know, from being a cop and thinking about all these guys behind trees. At that point, my kids would actually say … yes, that was when I changed.

  ‘I figured my kids love me, my dog loves me, my horse loves me, and I’ll go and do some positive things and maybe make my life more enjoyable.’

  And what he was talking about now – wanting debate on police powers – that was a positive thing, too, wasn’t it? ‘I think it is,’ he said. ‘See, I could so easily get on the plane next week, go back to Prague, and think, Who cares about New Zealand? But I do care.’

  He too
k a call on his mobile phone. He said later, ‘That was Pita Sharples.’ Last night, he said, he met with John Minto. ‘For the first time ever, we shook hands.’ A historic moment: Meurant, the Red Squad plod, in a peace and reconciliation moment with Minto, the most famous anti-apartheid protester from 1981. That had been arranged by a civil liberties group wanting him to address a rally. Once again, the phones were ringing. Lazarus was back by popular demand.

  [October 28]

  20

  David Cunliffe

  The Goodness of People

  You could tell at once what was going to happen when an old couple approached newly promoted cabinet minister David Cunliffe on the main shopping street in Titirangi. It was the day after Cunliffe was given the health portfolio, and his ranking rose to seventh in cabinet. New Zealanders are a fundamentally decent people; we excel at the slap on the back and the hip-hip-hooray; the couple were going to congratulate him, wish him all the best. It would be a small, good moment in a politician’s life.

  ‘Hello there,’ said Cunliffe, a tall, trim fellow, forty-four, with short gingery hair and a boyish, rather pleading face. He was dressed in clothes bought from Rodd & Gunn. His shirt was tucked in. It was easy to imagine him as a kid – a smart, eager, untroubled presence, toothy and freckled. He grew up in the Waikato, then in Pleasant Point in South Canterbury, as the son of an Anglican vicar. Later, when I asked him about his father, he said, ‘He was a very gentle man. Possibly sometimes too gentle, and possibly sometimes too willing to believe in the goodness of people.’

  The couple drew closer. Cunliffe was sitting in the passenger seat of his ministerial car parked outside a café. He wound down the window and leaned his head out. He was in a very cheerful mood. The previous night, he had celebrated his promotion by taking his two sons, aged six and two, on a Halloween trick or treat.

  The old man stepped up to the car and peered inside. A small, hapless moment in a politician’s life was in progress.

  ‘You’re in the government,’ he said.

  ‘Yes. I’m David Cunliffe, MP for New Lynn.’

  ‘Labour or National?’

  Cunliffe moved his shoulders a little bit further back into the car. He has been a Labour MP since 1999. Titirangi is in his electorate. But it was a good question: Cunliffe describes himself as both a capitalist and a socialist. He is the grand-great-nephew of Richard Seddon. His father was a ‘passionate supporter’ of Labour. ‘I guess I grew up with the Labour Party in my veins,’ he said during our interview. When I asked Cunliffe what the story of Jesus meant to him, he said, ‘The power of that story is the power of love, and how love can be brought to bear on everything, from loving an individual to making changes in social structures that make a difference in people’s lives.’

  As a high school student, he won a scholarship to an exclusive international college in a castle in Wales: ‘I got really fascinated when I was there with how the world works and the systems that make the world go around, and why some people end up poor and others rich.’

  He studied politics at Otago but wasn’t politically active. He began his career as a foreign affairs diplomat – postings in Australia, the Pacific, Washington – but left when he won a Fulbright scholarship to study at Harvard Business School. When he graduated, he was handpicked by the Boston Consulting Group. His minister’s salary is now $225,000; he earned more as a business economist.

  Cunliffe’s years working on the dark side have aroused suspicions among Labour traditionalists. When I asked him whether he had remained a Christian, he said, ‘Yes, and for some of my Labour Party colleagues it helps them to understand that I come to the party out of a pretty moral Christian socialist tradition that includes Vogel, and Walter Nash, and Michael Savage.’ This reminded me of political commentator Ian Templeton’s verdict of Cunliffe: ‘The prime minister rates him for his personal skills – surprisingly, given his vainglorious propensities.’

  ‘Labour,’ said Cunliffe, answering the old man’s question.

  ‘Hmmm.’

  There was a silence. Cunliffe said, ‘I’m the new health minister.’

  ‘Hmmm.’

  When I asked Cunliffe about his mother, Cunliffe said she was a hospital matron ‘and when I was teenager I was studying sciences, and hoping that one day I might be a doctor, so it’s kind of ironic I’m now the health minister.’

  After the second ‘hmmm’ on the street in Titirangi, there was another silence. Cunliffe said, ‘And how are you today?’

  It may be no wonder that Cunliffe wasn’t recognised by his constituent. He lives with his wife Karen – they met at Otago University when he was twenty; she now works as an environmental lawyer – and their sons in Herne Bay, that scented, pretty suburb tucked in by the water close to downtown Auckland. I asked how much his house was worth. He said, ‘Ahhh. Ummm. Well, quite a bit.’

  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 Di
vision? ‘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!’