Waring becomes a dame
It was a notorious episode in New Zealand’s political history: thenprime minister Rob Muldoon, visibly drunk, called a snap election on national television.
‘‘It doesn’t give my opponent much time to run up to an election, does it?’’ the National leader slurred to reporters, with his mortified party president standing beside him.
The reason behind the hasty election was a young National backbencher named Marilyn Waring, who will be made a dame companion for her services to women and economics in this year’s New Year Honours.
In June 1984, Waring threatened to cross the floor and vote for Richard Prebble’s anti-nuclear bill. This challenged Muldoon’s leadership, as the National Government had a majority of only one person. Muldoon called the snap election that evening.
Waring said she made the decision after being told that if there was a majority to see Prebble’s bill introduced, and even if it was ever to pass, the executive wouldn’t present it to the Governor-General for signature. ‘‘I thought, ‘God, what country am I living in? This is not what democracy means’. We didn’t deserve to be in Government any more.’’
In 1984, Waring returned to academia. In 1988 she published If Women Counted, the breakthrough book that persuaded the United Nations to redefine gross domestic product. It argues that women’s unpaid work is the largest sector of an economy. Waring has been writing and speaking on feminist economics across the globe for the past few decades. She’s a professor of public policy at Auckland University of Technology.