Aunty Helen - NZ’s greatest export
Helen Clark will never retire and as much as she wants a sleep in, there’s just too much to fight for.
‘‘I’m a campaigner by nature,’’ the 68-year-old former prime minister said.
Clark was in New Plymouth on Tuesday night to promote her new book Women, Equality,
Power and give a sold-out talk at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery/ Len Lye Centre to celebrate the 125th anniversary of women’s suffrage in New Zealand.
The atmosphere was buzzing with men and women hoping to get two minutes with, or even just a glimpse of, ‘Aunty Helen’, and she received rounds of applause and cheers from the crowd.
‘‘New Zealand’s greatest export’’, as she was billed, sat down with me beforehand to discuss women’s rights, the current government, life after office, and the challenges females in parliament faced.
Clark said she had no idea there were barriers for women until she got involved in politics, ‘‘cutting my teeth’’ on big issues such as the Vietnam War and apartheid.
‘‘I grew up in an all-girl family and I went to an all-girls school.
‘‘It goes right back to the home and what jobs girls and boys do.
‘‘I grew up on a farm so maybe if there had been boys they would have been out doing certain things and girls wouldn’t, but dad had four daughters so we were all conscripted. Someone had to open the gates, someone had to hold the lambs while their tales were cut off.
‘‘We just assumed that’s the way it was.’’
Clark said it wasn’t until she put her hand up to have a serious run at parliament that she encountered issues.
‘‘Then in the early 1980s those voices come out that say ‘oh she’ll never do any good’ and that kind of hung around a lot of years, right through when I was leader of the Opposition, but by the time I got to be prime minister I had seen off those kinds of critics.’’
Clark said she was disappointed to see gender comments arise during Jacinda Ardern’s campaign, which was close to 10 years after she had left office.
‘‘I think Jacinda dealt with those very effectively. They’re still out there in the social media, trolls and the odd shock jock explosion on radio and so on, but I think she is standing above it, which is the right thing to do.’’
Clark, whose home base is now Auckland with weekends spent at Waihi Beach, had nothing but praise for the current government saying she was ‘totally supportive’’ and ‘‘really hope they do well’’.
She also said it was very important for Ardern to travel to Nauru because ‘‘a lot of other countries are taking an interest in the Pacific’’.
Clark now dedicates a lot of her time to fighting for women’s rights, saying the next milestone was conquering violence against women.
‘‘The Me Too movement and the growing awareness of the significant problem that is sexual and gender-based violence, including in our own country where the statistics are horrible, so we really can’t say we’re there yet until women aren’t treated in that way.’’
Even though there’s a long way to go, Clark said it was important to remember the suffragettes.
‘‘We all stand on the shoulders of those women who dared to campaign and win the right to vote, it wasn’t granted to them, they won it, they fought for it.
‘‘We wouldn’t be where we are today if they didn’t have the courage to fight for it.’’