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Image: Archi Banal
Image: Archi Banal

OPINIONPoliticsAugust 26, 2022

The two sides of Trevor Mallard

Image: Archi Banal
Image: Archi Banal

He was an effective politician and a tireless champion of women. He could also be like a bully who seemed incapable of moderation or restraint, writes Ben Thomas.

Beleaguered – and now independent – MP Gaurav Sharma, locked in a battle against what he sees as bullying in parliament, will find little encouraging about the retirement of his one-time predecessor in the Hamilton West seat, Trevor Mallard.

Mallard has been variously described at different stages of his long career as a thug, an attack dog, a bovver-boy and, yes, a bully. And it would be hard to say he has not prospered. He retires to a plum diplomatic posting, where his business cards will eventually read “Rt. Hon. Sir Trevor Mallard”, after the knighthood that inevitably comes to former parliamentary speakers. He was a front bench minister in major portfolios.

But Mallard saw himself as a scourge of bullies. Perhaps this is what may grate Sharma most: that someone who entered parliament with the stated intention of cleaning it up, in the intervening 30 years before doing something about it, spent his time as one of the most ruthless practitioners of the brutal realities of politics. And more to the point, that he still doesn’t recognise any contradiction.

In the final act of his parliamentary career, the poacher famously turned gamekeeper: Mallard spent five years as speaker, responsible for maintaining the administration and also the very integrity of parliament. But he also attempted an even more jarring transformation than that of slugger to statesman.

Speaker of the House Trevor Mallard holds Labour MP Willow Jean Prime’s daughter during a debate on extending paid parental leave. (Screengrab: TVNZ)

He could have merely moved from partisan enforcer to stern no-favours disciplinarian. But Mallard also wanted to go from bouncer to baby bouncer. Gone was the Mallard physically blocking off and humiliating politically-risky millionaire Owen Glenn from prime minister Helen Clark in an infamous 2008 photo. Here now was Uncle Trevor cradling newborns in the speaker’s chair. He wanted to make parliament a safer and more inclusive place, especially (as shown by the commissioning and implementation of the Francis report into parliamentary culture) for women.

An admission: I had always assumed that this pivot was his attempt to manifest a softening that occurred in his personal life and outlook over the years into a more caring and progressive political environment. But on the occasion of his retirement his 1984 maiden speech was dug up, and in it the new member for Hamilton West really does put an early stake in the ground on parliamentary sexism and conduct that wouldn’t sound out of place in the 2010s. He upbraids MPs for supposedly ranking their women colleagues’ looks. He says “by doing that, men dehumanise women and devalue the contribution they make. That attitude is a major reason for rape in New Zealand.”

So what then are we to make of his subsequent, astoundingly long and varied roll call of dishonour?

Apropos rape culture, as sports minister he angrily talked about inserting a Heineken bottle into the chairman of the International Rugby Board. As late as 2010 he hurled homophobic insults across the house at National’s only gay MP at the time (he was hauled into line by now-deputy prime minister Grant Robertson). In the 2000s he was subject to a private prosecution by a member of the public for assault for starting a brawl with National MP Tau Henare.

With his dog Elsa at parliament (Photo: Labour Party of New Zealand / Supplied)

Stepping into the statesman-like role of speaker, he expressed regret for his mistakes in the past, and then prosecuted his new progressive causes with the same steel-cap subtlety as before.

As speaker, and in an effort to not minimise alleged instances of sexual harassment uncovered by the Francis Report, he overshot by orders of magnitude and accused a staff member of rape on national radio, leading to general alarm about the prospect of a serial rapist in parliament and a hefty taxpayer settlement.

His refereeing of question time was well-intentioned: he believed that implementing a system of penalties for poor behaviour (rewarding the opposition by giving them extra supplementary questions to ask ministers, punishing them by taking them away) could improve the functioning of question time and so the accountability of ministers. Again, his failure was the inability to exercise moderation or restraint: all parties lost count of the wildly oscillating ledger of questions, as Mallard sought to correct in real time not only MPs’ bad behaviour but even his second-thoughts about events only minutes before. That created uncertainty, which plays into the hands of any government trying to avoid answering questions.

Prime minister Helen Clark and sports minister Trevor Mallard at a netball match, July 2000. (Photo: Phil Walter/Getty Images)

Had he been a less effective soldier for his party, any one of his many career lowlights could have turned him into an infamous one-miss wonder of the likes of Aaron Gilmore, whose sins were minor, basically non-existent, by comparison.

But Mallard got things done. He was entrusted as one of Helen Clark’s most effective ministers. He was given the big jobs; the hard jobs. The ones that required deft handling but also confrontation, and, as a treat, his beloved sports portfolio. He was the first in front to denigrate or smear Clark’s opponents, while she maintained prime ministerial decorum or made knowing offhand jokes about “having a taser” for her henchman.

He was not particularly ideological, and thought commercially for a social democrat. As minister of state-owned enterprises, he changed policy to make it easier for big (then) state-owned companies like Meridian and Mighty River Power to establish subsidiaries for eventual sale (that is, privatisation).

It’s irrelevant to the public – and his targets over the years – that he is also personable, funny, clever and good company. But as speaker, he implemented reforms to processes that fans of procedural minutiae have praised. He was praised by the Women MP Committee for improving parental facilities and making it easier to be a mother in parliament. He made sure there was a nice slide on parliament’s lawns, at least for a while.

Second acts in public life are common. Many senior politicians, after a period out of the public eye and as a result of reflection and introspection, will come back changed figures. Jim Bolger, the 1990s prime minister who slashed welfare and stripped employment protections, re-emerged a few years ago as a critic of “neoliberalism” and helped out developing the current government’s fair pay agreements.

Mallard has had no time for reflection. And as the sometimes disconnect between his nobler intentions and his behaviour shows, he in many ways has been a stranger to himself: the id of Labour’s parliamentary politics. The snarling, animalistic impulse unleashed to batter the opposition, to crush internal dissent, to put down political resistance from the public, the unions, the interest groups, whoever was in the way. The part that Uncle Trevor always seems surprised to be reminded exists at all.


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Nothing conveys the nitty gritty detail like a good old fashioned book. (Image: Alessandra Banal)
Nothing conveys the nitty gritty detail like a good old fashioned book. (Image: Alessandra Banal)

OPINIONPoliticsAugust 25, 2022

Politicians owe it to us to write more books

Nothing conveys the nitty gritty detail like a good old fashioned book. (Image: Alessandra Banal)
Nothing conveys the nitty gritty detail like a good old fashioned book. (Image: Alessandra Banal)

MPs love to decry the soundbite-driven media and the combative interviews that come with it. But few take up the chance to explain themselves at length. Henry Cooke thinks they should.

Back when I was a political reporter, new colleagues in the gallery would occasionally ask around for a reading list.

Was there a book, or series of books, that would give them a bit of a grounding in the political events of the last several decades? As the median age of journalists appeared to trend downward this question only became more relevant – there were simply fewer and fewer reporters who’d been working in the media during the Key years, let alone the Clark or Bolger years. 

I always found myself struggling to give a good answer. It isn’t just that there is no “one great book” – of course there isn’t – it’s that there are basically none. I ended up half-heartedly recommending the few bits of good political history easily watchable online (Revolution and Campaign), which are passed down like relics from POLS 111 student to POLS 111 student, and then perhaps a Colin James or Rebecca Macfie book.

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Instead New Zealand’s recent political history is largely scattered around the broken archives of news websites, badly-cited Wikipedia articles, and Hansard. If you are, like me, a true sicko who wants to understand more than the broad-brush achievements of a government that reigned before you were a conscious adult, you’re mostly out of luck. 

This ahistoricism is a failure of many of our country’s institutions. Professional historians prefer the comfort zone of the not-so-recent past, meaning we get interesting articles about tax policy in the 1980s published in 2015. Journalists only draw on the past when they need to for a story, and even then they often forget to. And politicians are never that happy to remind you of how many different positions their party may have had on a policy issue – they’ll put up a portrait of Michael Joseph Savage, but they won’t talk to you about how they felt about the foreshore and seabed debate.

My solution won’t fix this entirely, but I think it will help: Politicians need to write more books.

The last prime minister to write a book about his or her time in office was Jim Bolger in 1998. Not only has John Key not written a book, he didn’t even sit down with Guyon Espiner for his 9th Floor interviews that other Prime Ministers used to go over their time in office. Even Bill English, who is intimidatingly smart and clearly felt that he was leaving politics with unfinished business in the social investment space, has not found the time to write something. 

I’m not saying any of these books would actually be good. The recent crop of books by former politicians – I’m thinking of Christopher Finlayson’s Yes Minister, Michael Cullen’s Labour Saving and Marilyn Waring’s The Political Years – all lacked the narrative tension and zoom-out research that truly great non-fiction requires. Instead these books all acted as essentially lists of events and policy issues, with context given by the politician – whether it be the cabinet mood at the time, what they regret or don’t regret about a decision, or how their thinking may have changed over time. 

But while these books may not be fantastic literature, they are valuable. Giving a politician the space they will never get in an interview or a press release to really explain their decision-making, with the wisdom of hindsight and no pressure to conform to a party line can yield results that should be interesting in the present and to future historians. 

Often what’s most intriguing is what’s left out. In David Lange’s memoir, the most talented writer to ever reach the ninth floor simply glides over his own role in allowing his government and party to fall apart, resorting to hilarious insults instead. Barack Obama, another talented writer, seems to just accept that the pharmaceutical industry’s demands of his healthcare bill have to be implemented, even with a filibuster-proof majority in congress. These omissions give us a real insight into both men’s brains.

Then prime minister David Lange and his finance minister Roger Douglas peruse a copy of Douglas’ book, 1987. (Photo: John Nicholson for Evening Post via National Library)

It isn’t just prime ministers or even elected MPs who should write more – it’s all political actors. The Tony Blair years in the UK are perhaps best understood through the diaries of his staffer Alastair Campbell, much as Margaret Hayward’s diary of her years as Norman Kirk’s secretary are invaluable. 

If these people at the height of power keep good enough notes, they can open up a series of rooms that the New Zealand public deserves some entry into. What were the discussions like in the immediate hours after the Canterbury earthquakes? What was the first thing Clark thought when she woke to the news of 9/11, or the Israeli passport scandal, or Tariana Turia leaving to start a new party? How exactly did Bill English process not just the grim economic picture he inherited as a new finance minister, but the news that John Key was stepping down? We have glimpses of some of this in bits of journalism or oral history, such as Andrea Vance’s excellent Blue Blood or the Inside Stories book by Claudia Pond Eyley and Dan Salmon on Helen Clark – but history deserves fuller accounting.

It’s easy to see why these books have dried up. Publishing a book used to bring in some income (which people like Lange needed). Nowadays social media gives former politicians like Clark a far more direct way to let her views be known, and none of them seem to be really hurting for cash. 

But nothing beats a book for explaining oneself at length. And if we are going to fix the ahistoricism that pervades our country, locking so many out of detailed knowledge of the recent past, we should start at the top.


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