Dear John, you knew when to get out
Dear John, you left us before we could leave you.
With the same intuitive sense of timing that served you so well on the currency markets, trading on the rising and falling New Zealand dollar, you knew when to get out.
Those less generous than me have asked, what of a legacy? Did you make New Zealand a better place – or did you, in the immortal words of your predecessor Robert Muldoon, leave it ‘‘no worse off than you found it’’?
What they fail to recognise is that you were, proudly, a conservative leader. You never sought to be known as a visionary.
The task of a conservative is to conserve that which is good, to keep HMNZS Aotearoa on course through sometimes choppy waters.
Inheriting the premiership in the depths of the global financial crisis, confronted with the Pike River mine disaster, the Canterbury and the Kaikoura earthquakes, you kept us sailing through and out the other side.
Leaders like Helen Clark and Rod Donald and Helen Kelly earned their stripes on the protest lines, challenging New Zealand on the Vietnam War, the Springbok Tour, nuclear ship visits.
There is no grainy TV footage of you carrying a placard.
Instead, my enduring memory of you is from 2005, alone in a corner of the Beehive cafe.
Other MPs nattered. You got some sandwiches then sat down, rolled up your sleeves and slightly loosened your tie as you worked through piles of spreadsheets to design National’s tax cut policy.
Some may have aspired to change the world; you sought to manage the small change.
As prime minister you became ruthless, this is true. As ruthless as Judith Collins and Steven Joyce; as ruthless as Clark and Michael Cullen.
Like those before you, you entered Parliament for all the right reasons – to secure and build New Zealand’s future. Like those others, the means sometimes came to justify the end. There were those small people who inadvertently got in your way – I’m thinking of Cuppagate videographer Bradley Ambrose or environmental scientist Dr Mike Joy – whom you trampled in your path.
There were many more you never met, who didn’t see the benefits of your economic management; who live in cars or packed 20 to a house.
But as you hand over the baton to Bill English, it is with a very big head-start in the race to the 2017 election. English, like you, is hardworking and committed. More than you, he is conscientious and principled. He may be a very good prime minister. But tainted and taunted with the tag ‘‘loser’’ after his record defeat in the 2002 election, he will be a poor electionyear leader. He will struggle to protect the long lead you have gifted him.
He may yet snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.