GRAHAM ADAMS: The Rosy Resurrection of Helen Clark

Just don’t mention the foreshore and seabed.

Helen Clark’s gift of $86.8 million to the arts sector in May 2000 turned out to be a canny investment. The opera aficionado’s benevolence early in her first term as Prime Minister seems to have guaranteed her the undying devotion of the luvvies who dominate the world of theatre, music and film. 

They will forgive her anything — except perhaps 2004’s Foreshore and Seabed Act.

Little surprise then that Auckland Theatre Company — which received a $1.16 million grant from Creative NZ last year — commissioned Fiona Samuel to write a play about her.

The publicity guff for this “hilarious” stage production titled “Helen Clark in Six Outfits” — which highlights criticism of her appearance — proclaims: “She didn’t just break the glass ceiling; she ice-axed it.”

There’s inadvertent hilarity right there. The metaphor is undoubtedly meant to allude to Clark’s alpine adventures but, for anyone who is even vaguely aware of the left’s history, an ice-axe conjures up images of Leon Trotsky famously being despatched by one.

She, of course, ruthlessly deposed Mike Moore in 1993 as Labour’s leader, but it was Jenny Shipley who shattered the glass ceiling by becoming the nation’s first female Prime Minister in 1997 (and the first woman to lead the National Party).

Predictably, ATC accords Clark the ersatz title of “first elected female Prime Minister”, with its insidious and baseless implication that Shipley’s premiership was somehow less legitimate or worthy than hers. It is like a child who comes second in a race insisting that if the winner hadn’t been ahead of them they would have come first.

It is clear that no one in the highly politicised arts sector is willing to acknowledge a female National Party leader as a trail-blazer. Stating the bleeding obvious — that Clark was our second female Prime Minister — would presumably damage the fragile underpinnings of the Cult of Helen.

National’s Ruth Richardson, who became New Zealand’s first female Minister of Finance in 1990, is similarly persona non grata. Despite her take-no-prisoners style that helped break stereotypes of what was expected of female politicians, she has also been airbrushed from the canon of female emancipators.

Instead, the luvvies are determined to ignore history in order to promote their cherished belief that “Helen Clark broke through the glass ceiling to lead the way for women in power” — as ATC publicity puts it.

And it is not only the play’s “world premiere” in Auckland this month that is burnishing her halo. Journalists are also barely able to contain their brimming admiration for Clark.

For her first outing as co-host on TVNZ’s Breakfast last week, Tova O’Brien interviewed Christopher Luxon and then Helen Clark.

O’Brien introduced her distinguished guest directly to camera with, “Former Prime Minister Helen Clark was for nearly a decade the third-most powerful person at the UN” — before she turned to Clark and gushed, “[and] probably should have been the most powerful person at the UN.”

Clark beamed. She obviously thought so herself.

Few of her devotees, however, want to acknowledge that the former head of the United Nations Development Programme achieved only fifth place in the final round of the selection process for UN Secretary-General in 2016. 

Never a gracious loser, she has claimed that the UN was far too scared of her tough and decisive character to select her. Describing the run-up to the UN race, and the need to stand up to Russia, the US and China, she said: “The tragedy is that the world is looking for leadership. We had some conversations as to whether I should present as not a strong leader. Pretend that I was an ineffectual person who wouldn't say boo to a goose. But that wasn’t me.”

Who would have guessed that Clark’s failed attempt to lead the UN was not just a personal defeat but a tragedy for the whole world?

O’Brien’s chummy interview with Clark began with discussing Iran. She posed patsy questions such as whether there was an “inconsistency” in the government condemning Iran’s attacks but not those by the US, and whether the actions by the US and Israel were “illegal”. Given such favourable openings, Clark was not only quick to agree but keen to expound on her own virtues.She took the opportunity to contrast her own staunchness during the Iraq invasion in 2003 with what she sees as the current government’s more timid approach to Iran, asserting that under her leadership New Zealand didn’t cower and go along with our allies  — “We stuck to our guns.”

She boasted that her bold stance didn’t cost New Zealand “a single kilogram of trade” — conveniently overlooking the fact that George W. Bush wasn’t anywhere near as capricious or as vindictive as Donald Trump. Everyone is aware that if our government sufficiently annoys the US President, tariffs on our exports could double overnight.

Winston Peters was next up for discussion. Clark preposterously claimed that NZ First was cynically going “full-scale MAGA” over the Iran conflict to get enough votes to clear the five per cent threshold.

Nevertheless, she thought Chris Hipkins shouldn’t rule out NZ First “right now” given “Labour is actually doing quite well” — and he was unlikely to be pushed around by Peters in a coalition in the way she believed Luxon is. She described Hipkins as “a pretty experienced political operator” who could handle Peters.

This is a wildly optimistic view given that before 2023’s election Hipkins ruled out working with Peters because he regarded him as a “force of instability and chaos” after having worked with him in the 2017-20 term.

At the end of their love-fest, O’Brien thanked the “Prime Minister” — before correcting herself to “former Prime Minister”. 

Clark beamed again.

She clearly enjoys having an easy ride in public discussions — including as an “influencer” on X. She has 221,000 followers on that site but severely restricts who can comment (as well as pre-emptively blocking large numbers who are not able to follow or message her). Nevertheless, her think tank — the Helen Clark Foundation — nominates “inclusion” and “fairness” as two of her personal goals it aims to promote.

The aspect of her time as Prime Minister that her acolytes are most determined to gloss over is, of course, 2004’s Foreshore and Seabed Act, which vested legal ownership of the public foreshore and seabed in the Crown. In advance publicity for the ATC play, the NZ Herald implied it was a “misstep”, before explicitly describing it as a “debacle”, which apparently merits only a “mention” in the play’s script.

If true, it is a strange topic to gloss over, even in a satirical work. The legislation was one of the defining and most explosive episodes of her premiership; it sparked the creation of the Māori Party and a massive hikoi to Wellington.

Clark refused to talk to the protesters, who wanted Māori seeking customary coastal rights to be able to take their case to the courts. She dismissed them as “the same old faces — the Ken Mairs, the Harawira families, the Annette Sykes — the haters and wreckers”.

Ironically, while much of the left wants to depict the 2004 law as a regrettable aberration on the CV of the woman many refer to affectionately as “Aunty Helen”, conservative organisations such as Hobson’s Pledge and the NZ Centre for Political Research have come to see Clark’s legislation as the most-effective template for dealing with Māori claims over the coast.

Her law was overturned in 2011 by John Key’s government — which had a supply and confidence agreement with the Māori Party — and replaced by the Marine and Coastal Area Act (MACA). Shepherded through Parliament by Chris Finlayson, the legislation is based on the novel idea that the foreshore and seabed belong to no one. 

It was also so clumsily drafted it has allowed activist judges to use the malleable notion of tikanga to grant Customary Marine Title to swathes of the New Zealand coastline. 

The Coalition government has tightened the act’s criteria for granting title but NZCPR’s Muriel Newman sees that as an inadequate remedy. She wrote: “The only fool-proof way to protect the coastline for all New Zealanders is to return it to Crown ownership by repealing the Marine and Coastal Area Act and restoring the 2004 Foreshore and Seabed Act.”

Hobson’s Pledge trustee Don Brash argued at the select committee reviewing the MACA amendment legislation in October 2024: “We feel strongly supportive of this bill as it intends to amend the original Marine and Coastal Area Act. Having said that, if we had a choice we’d go back to the Foreshore and Seabed Act in 2004 where the Crown owns the foreshore and seabed on behalf of all New Zealanders, but that isn’t on the table.”

When he was National’s leader, Brash had been strongly opposed to Clark’s legislation as not going far enough to protect all New Zealanders’ rights. He very nearly won 2005’s election on the strength of that position — memorably summed up in the “Iwi / Kiwi” billboard campaign and his “One law for all” slogan. The fact he now supports her law more than 20 years after such a bitter election campaign polarised the nation is truly remarkable. However, it is a safe bet that a play titled “Don Brash and Helen Clark: A Love Story”, which explored the issue in depth, would have no chance of winning taxpayers’ cash from our cultural commissars to fund it.

Far better to stick to bewailing the “misogyny” that female politicians have faced on account of their wardrobe and crooked teeth — leaving the question of why such an allegedly sexist nation elected Clark for three consecutive terms as an enduring mystery.

• Helen Clark in Six Outfits, 7–26 April, ASB Waterfront Theatre.

Graham Adams is a freelance editor, journalist and columnist. He lives on Auckland’s North Shore.