DAVID CLARK

No accidental minister

The man at the top of New Zealand’s health system didn’t make it into medical school. It wasn’t for lack of trying, even if David Clark already had an inkling during his first year at Otago University that he wouldn’t get there.

‘‘By halfway through the year I’d decided that I didn’t want to do medicine because it involved a lot of biology and chemistry, which I should have known,’’ he says. ‘‘And I didn’t enjoy, so much, the nuts and bolts side of it.

‘‘But in my competitiveness I decided that I wanted to get into medical school so that I could turn them down at the end of the year.’’

He didn’t get the opportunity to deliver that politely put middle-finger salute. ‘‘Despite spending my whole year flogging myself just so I could turn them down . . . I got an A-, which was what was required, but not a high enough Aaverage to actually get in.’’

Pride, meet fall.

Ironic then that the man deemed not good enough for medical school, not particularly interested in the ‘‘nuts and bolts’’ of it, should find himself deep in such things as the health minister.

Deep in the minutiae of rotting Middlemore Hospital; angry, underpaid nurses, midwives and mental health workers; potential fraud investigations into CEO largesse; district health boards drowning in debt and outcries over chronic underfunding. The list goes on.

Ironic, also, that he would volunteer for one of the most tricky, potentially career-ending gigs in government, when the call went out to replace the retiring Annette King. ‘‘I didn’t have to crawl over bodies to get the health portfolio,’’ says the 45-year-old, ‘‘but I didn’t come here to warm a back seat, I came here because I want to make a difference.’’

The evidence might suggest otherwise, but Clark is no accidental health minister. He’s a curious, intriguing mix of eye-narrowed ambition and big-picture intellect, competitiveness and compassion, a boldness built on humble beginnings, and a desire to help the downtrodden that belies a cockiness and maybe, even, a touch of arrogance.

It’s a ministerial mash-up that had its beginnings in two worlds: the gentle rhythm of sea and life in the near-pastoral Auckland suburb of Beachlands, where Clark grew up, and the jarring bustle and blunt concrete of neighbouring Otara, where his mother worked as a GP.

‘‘She did that because she wanted to be involved in working with under-served communities, because there was a strong sense of purpose – she would call it a calling – so it was always a part of the conversation.’’

His mother’s work gave Clark a first look at the ‘‘challenges for health of growing up in more deprived areas . . . and the way that impacts on life outcomes’’.

That conversation continued in the Clark household and Presbyterian church, where he and his mother were regular visitors – ‘‘my father, his religiosity extended to going running with his mates every Sunday’’.

As other children shuffled in their pews and yearned for the warm sea waving so invitingly through the windows, Clark was in thrall to the ebb and flow of the sermon.

‘‘I can remember . . . as a 10-year-old I found [them] more fascinating than school because the intellectual arguments that were being worked through by the more academic-oriented ministers really fascinated me.’’

As an adult he would go on to deliver his own sermons as an ordained minister, and act as celebrant for political colleagues. But he was not always so earnest as a youngster.

Clark was more focused on ‘‘social activities than study’’ during the sixth form at Auckland’s St Kentigern College. And he spent his last year as an exchange student in Germany, inspired in part by the challenge of being immersed in the language but also two earlier girlfriends from that part of the world.

‘‘My teenage self thought, that experience being positive, then going to the country where they came from couldn’t be a bad thing.’’

Clark would return later for more esoteric, academic pursuits, but not before heading home for the fall of his university medical career and the rise of a greater interest in theology and philosophy.

Studies in both led him back to Germany and Eberhard Karls University in Tubingen. And eventually a PhD on the work of little-known but highly influential academic Helmut Herbert Hermann Rex.

‘‘I discovered there was a dozen senior academics that all credited their life course and interests in a variety of fields with having encountered this guy, who’d come out to New Zealand as a refugee from Nazi Germany.

‘‘He taught his students to read broadly and to question things, in a way that wasn’t fashionable at the time,’’ says Clark. ‘‘He spoke about homosexuality in late 50s, race relations, things that were taboo topics in New Zealand.’’

Like Rex, Clark, too, has read and researched broadly. As well as an academic background in German, the arts, theology and philosophy, his three years as a Treasury analyst gave him an insight into the many portfolios and moving parts of the government machine he would later help steer.

That cocky confidence and supreme competence were paired to meet the challenge of getting the role.

He swotted up on economic terms – ‘‘costbenefit analysis, incentives and trade-offs, and marginal costs’’ – to ‘‘bluff’’ his way through the interview.

Those insights touched on myriad sectors covered by the umbrella of social justice and societal health, suggesting he has the acumen to back any ambition beyond his current portfolio.

Other highly placed ministers may be looking over their shoulders. Bu they will be comforted by the fact that, for now at least, the married father of three has plenty to focus on in his own backyard.

He has lofty goals for the health sector and talks often about an enthusiasm for reform and ‘‘really progressive change’’.

‘‘People elect Labour-led governments because they want bold change,’’ he says. ‘‘At a basic values level I think everybody should have the same basic opportunities. I find it appalling that kids go to school hungry.’’

That extends to the health system, says Clark, which is not working. ‘‘The district health board system has some real strengths,’’ he says, ‘‘you have local innovation, response to local need. What you don’t have . . . is the sharing of that innovation across the system.

‘‘[Also] I’d like to see a review because I want a greater emphasis on primary care, mental health and public delivery of services.’’

That’s the bigger picture, but Clark has a few ‘‘nuts and bolts’’ to sort through first, including a threat of strikes by nurses.

There’s also a sizeable fiscal hole. Labour has promised to spend $8 billion on health over its first term, but Clark claims close to one-third of that was practically wiped as soon as the coalition government got in because the previous government didn’t spend the $2.4b needed just to keep up with changes in population and demographics over the past eight years.

Add to that another estimate – $14b in construction needed in the next decade.

Clark, clearly, will need to draw on everything he learned as a representative cyclist in the hills above Dunedin and in ironman events later on – the strategy in ‘‘working with others to get to a certain point in the race’’, and then the competitive streak ‘‘in order to win it’’.

He’s a man who doesn’t like to stand still; the ‘‘stand-up’’ table in his office is a shrine to action in a role that requires many hours of sitting and meetings.

‘‘The founders of the Labour Party were mostly Christians who saw this as a pragmatic kind of christianity that was about delivering rather than talking, on creating a society where everybody could play their part.’’

He’d better get on his bike, then.

''As a 10-year-old I found [them] more fascinating than school because the intellectual arguments that were being worked through by the more academic-oriented ministers really fascinated me."

Clark on his childhool fascination with church sermons